[poppler] Chinese characters broken

[mpsuzuki at hiroshima-u.ac.jp]

Hi,

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:38:44 +0800 (CST)
ddreamer at ms93.url.com.tw wrote:
>Sorry, I have attached two files instead.

No need to say sorry, I want to know the name
of Chinese Kaisu-like typeface used in the PDF
in previous message.

>Screenshot.png is normal result while
>Screenshot-1.png is abnormal result.
>The original PDF file is
>http://launchpadlibrarian.net/19751825/dell440.pdf

This is very very well known issue caused by
SimSun and patent-free TrueType rasterizer.

SimSun, a Chinese font bundled to Microsoft
Windows, uses the patented hinting instruction
very heavily to stretch the glyphic component
to form composed glyph shape.

# Except of SimSun, there are several fonts
# showing similar problems, but SimSun is
# the most popular example.

To rasterize such fonts to the shape which the
font designer expect, the patented hinting
technology is essential.

To provide the liberated software products,
many free softwares use a TrueType rasterizer
without patented hinter. Thus, the shape of
SimSun is very heavily broken.

Fortunately, the known patents of TrueType hinter
are expired recently, so the latest FreeType
library enables TrueType hinter by default.

Therefore, I recommend you to ask the system
administrator to update FreeType library to
the latest version. Or, you can use older FreeType
with non-default configuration to enable TrueType
rasterizer.

Regards,
mpsuzuki

P.S.
Albert, should I write some document for web page to
explain about SimSun issue? I think the number of
posts about SimSun issue in poppler list is more than
that in FreeType list...