Re: [dev] [patch] dmenu - support for xft font rendering

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 10:02:16PM +0200, pancake wrote:
>I personally use 10x20 font or the fixed one. But
>certainly..reading the web with courier is not as nice as with
>verdana.. Typographic nazis tend to be quite extremist in pro
>to a correct use of fonts, like killing comic sans and so on..

I should think that any sane person would be in favor of killing
Comic Sans and Courier, and preferably also the designer of the
former (although perhaps he can't be blamed, given that the
original purpose of the font was restricted to the domain of
comic speech bubbles, though it was a badly designed font even
for that).

>I certainly think that having such possibility will be good. I
>know that font systems are a quite mad, and utf8 is far more
>complex than just plain ascii or bitmapped fonts. In fact ttf
>is a virtual machine, and opentype supports as weird things as
>many different capital letters or combinations of two chars.
>This is great for typographic ppl, and they tend to defend this
>position in benefit of ease of reading.

The TTF hinting virtual machine is fairly simple, and with good
reason: it makes it possible to display AA fonts onscreen with
as little blurring as possible. Admittedly, the newer
auto-hinters do a decent job of this these days, but not nearly
as good as as the professional hinting encoded into high quality
fonts.

As for OTF features, they're meant for professional typesetting
more than for screen fonts. But even then, kerning tables make a
big difference even for screen fonts, and the proper small caps
fonts look orders of magnitude better than faked small caps.
Other than that, you don't even have to the other OTF features
from most applications (except occasionally for ligature
substitution), other than typesetting programs like InDesign and
XeTeX.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was
written, and another for which it wasn't.
	--Alan J. Perlis