Fwd: [Openfontlibrary] david berlow on screen type

[Raph Levien]

On 2/6/07, Gustavo Ferreira <grilo at centroin.com.br> wrote:
> this is hot:
>
> http://www.rogerblack.com/blog/second_font_war
> http://www.rogerblack.com/blog/screen_fonts_history

I've been playing with this kind of thing too, in different ways. See,
for example, my FontFocus prototype:

http://www.artifex.com/FontFocus.pdf

The biggest problem with Berlow's approach is the more delicate
dependence on configuration. After all, Murphy's law for configuration
science reads, "anything that can be configured will be
mis-configured." Especially with the multiple outlines for different
sizes, there is a large risk that the wrong outline will be chosen.
And we can look forward to that risk increasing dramatically as the
resolution of displays breaks loose of the 1 pixel per px box.

Using the hinting mechanism as in Windows is more reliable, but is
fundamentally not much different than "superhinted" fonts like
Monotype's ESQ series or Bitstream Vera. Perhaps the workflow of
creating multiple hand-tuned size-specific outlines is more
comfortable for type designers such as Berlow than tweaking bytecodes,
but the space of what is possible is roughly the same. Of course, the
TrueType hint language is patented too, but those patents will expire
soon and lots of users don't care anyway.

See also Hrant Papazian's grayscale pixel fonts, like his Mana.

http://www.daidala.com/25apr2004.html
http://www.daidala.com/mana-13.html

Bottom line: it would definitely be possible for Linux to improve its
screen font display, but it requires a sense of will from the
community, which I think is basically lacking. Much more likely to see
incremental improvements, and chasing what the proprietary systems do
for their screen fonts.

Raph