Re: New uim.spec and some notes for Japanese

UTUMI Hirosi <[email protected]> :

> 3. Font rendering for Japanese
> I think outline fonts are better than embedded bitmaps.
> I added some lines to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf.
> See fonts.conf.diff please.

The embedded bitmaps are enabled on purpose. See the following
part of /etc/fonts/suse-pre-user.conf:

    <!--
        Use embedded bitmaps by default for all CJK fonts.

        (By the way, "Courier New" also has embedded bitmaps, i.e. there
        really are some non-CJK fonts which have embedded bitmaps.
        But, for reasons unknown to me, the embedded bitmaps in "Courier New"
        are not used, even when I enable embedded bitmaps for all fonts instead
        of enabling them only for CJK fonts. And on top of that, the embedded
        bitmaps in "Courier New" appear to be of lower quality than the
        results achieved when rendering "Courier New" with the byte code
        interpreter enabled and the antialiasing turned off. Therefore
        I stay with enabling embedded bitmaps only for CJK fonts or the moment).
    -->

            <match target="font">
                    <test name="lang" compare="contains">
                            <string>ja</string>
                            <string>zh</string>
                            <string>ko</string>
                    </test>
                    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
                            <bool>true</bool>
                    </edit>
            </match>

The easiest way to disable embedded bitmaps for Japanese would be
to remove the line

                            <string>ja</string>

in /etc/fonts/suse-pre-user.conf.

But from the feedback I got until now, most users seemed to like the
embedded bitmaps, therefore I enabled them by default.  But not many
users gave feedback at all about this subject.

Personally I think that the embedded bitmaps are usually less
beautiful but better readable. And I guess that a font designer who
includes embedded bitmaps in his fonts does this because he believes
they give better results than the outlines. If the font designer
doesn't think so, why include embedded bitmaps at all?

But if most users like the outlines better, we could of course change
the default. The problem is that it seems to be highly subjective
which rendering style is best. I want to disable embedded bitmaps for
Japanese by default only if we are *sure* that the majority of users
prefers the outlines. How to find out? 

-- 
Mike FABIAN   <[email protected]>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian



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