openjdk6-b17 Pre Release 2

[Brian Gardner]

Thanks for busting out the giant excavator and digging this info up.   
I'm still curious, and a bit jealous as to why the Utopia font isn't  
showing up for me.  Would you mind emailing me a list of installed  
packages (output of pkg_info) and your fontconfig.properties if it is  
different from the version distributed with pre release 2.

Brian


On Nov 6, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Stephen McKay wrote:

> 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.
>