[cairo] Scaled fixed size fonts

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi,

Your message is a bit vague in details.  Do you have a simple test case?

behdad

On 14-01-06 03:48 AM, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> In the GNUstep project we use cairo as our default drawing backend. One
> user complained that with cairo some fonts get displayed worse than with
> the direct xlib based backend. It turns out that on this computer only
> the Adobe fonts are installed and this are fixed size fonts.
> I investigated a bit in our code and later in the cairo code and this
> burns down to the function cairo_scaled_font_create() returning not the
> best suited fixed size font, but a scaled version of the standard 12
> point font.
> 
> The reason is that _cairo_ft_font_face_get_implementation() in
> cairo-ft-font.c reuses the same resolved font even when the font isn't
> scalable and the matrix did change. My suggestion now is to extend the
> tests in this function to first inspect the pattern whether it is
> scalable. If it isn't, compare the pixel size of the cached resolved
> font with the new pixel size (This code needs to be extracted from
> _cairo_ft_resolve_pattern) and if that doesn't match within certain
> limits (which might be the hard bit to define) the old resolved font
> gets thrown away and replaced by a newly created one. Or we leave the
> cached one alone and just create a new one?
> 
> This solution will use up more resource than the current one and if
> there is no better matching fixed pixel font it will result in the same
> display with a lot more overhead. Still for some cases it will result in
> better drawn fonts. And for the most common case where scalable fonts
> get used it will be almost no overhead.
> 
> Would cairo be willing to accept a patch in this direction? I am willing
> to write on, but only if this effort isn't completely wasted.
> 
> Fred
> 

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/