openjdk6-b17 Pre Release 2

[Stephen McKay]

On Saturday, 7th November 2009, Stephen McKay wrote:

>On Friday, 6th November 2009, Brian Gardner wrote:
>
>>Antialiasing seems to work well in the other fonts.  Perhaps there is  
>>an issue with a specific font type.
>
>Well, it's a Type1 font.  The world seems to favour TrueType these days.
>I'll poke about and see if I can find a Type1 vs TrueType trend in this,
>or if it's just Utopia.

I feel like I've been on an archaeological dig...

Openjdk6 uses freetype, while the other JDKs use an internal renderer.
That's pretty much the end of the story.  Differences are to be expected.

I've verified that Utopia shown by ftview using freetype-2.3.9 matches
openjdk6's output, so what I am seeing is the difference in quality
between the Sun owned renderer (that we can't have) and the free
renderer (that we can have).

People round the web are also upset with what they see as regressions
in freetype regarding Type1 font rendering after revision 2.1.9.

I've checked the output of 2.1.9 vs 2.3.9 and have observed (for a
small sample only) that 2.3.9 is indeed worse in places, though it's
hard to generalise it to a blanket "2.1.9 is better than 2.3.9"
statement.  I'll give reverting to 2.1.9 a go myself, just for fun.

I quickly checked a couple of truetype fonts and they seemed fine.
Differences between the Sun JDK renderer and freetype must be minimal
if any exist at all.

So, summarising once again: openjdk6's use of freetype means that font
rendering will differ from other JDKs.  For Type1 fonts, this could
mean that they look worse rather than better.

Cheers,

Stephen.