Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 20:55:32 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: James Howard <howardjp@well.com>, Joseph Mallett <jmallett@newgold.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: banner(6) Message-ID: <20010417205532.P74385@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010417124229.0458bec0@localhost>; from brett@lariat.org on Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:47:57PM -0600 References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010416211727.045766e0@localhost> <Pine.GSO.4.21.0104161028290.23302-100000@well.com> <20010416191256.R27477@lpt.ens.fr> <Pine.GSO.4.21.0104161028290.23302-100000@well.com> <20010416193151.U27477@lpt.ens.fr> <4.3.2.7.2.20010416211727.045766e0@localhost> <20010417095140.A74385@lpt.ens.fr> <4.3.2.7.2.20010417124229.0458bec0@localhost>
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Brett Glass said on Apr 17, 2001 at 12:47:57: > > >I think that needs clarification. Merely scaling a font (multiplying > >by a factor x) doesn't create a new font. A scalable helvetica > >postscript font is the same font at all sizes. > > Not true. Adobe, and others, have sometimes misused the word > "font," applying it to what is correctly callled a typeface. > You don't scale a font; you scale a typeface in the process > of rendering a font (see below). > > >Traditionally, when you scale a typeface (in particular, make it > >smaller) you're supposed to change its appearance to improve > >readability. > > Not quite. When you create a font from a typeface (a process which > is called "rendering"), you may choose to employ tricks such as > anti-aliasing. The purpose of these tricks is not to change the > appearance of the typeface but rather to preserve it! Most of these > tricks deal with the pixellated nature of modern computer displays. I wasn't talking about rendering on the screen: I was talking about printed books. I was talking about readability in the sense of what the human eye can comfortably discern at small sizes. If you look at any book by a respectable publisher before 1980, you'll see that letters in small type are broader (relative to their height), more rounded, somewhat more broadly spaced (again, relative to their height), and contain other slight differences, though they may belong to the same typeface (Times/Baskerville/whatever). This has nothing to do with pixellation: the resolution of ink on paper is quite sufficient to render fonts clearly at very small sizes. It's just that to read a regular 10pt font shrunk to 6pt comfortably, many people would need a magnifying glass simply because it's too "squashed up" otherwise. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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