https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229207 ------- Comment #18 from mfabian@novell.com 2007-01-05 09:08 MST ------- By changing the resolution, one can change the font sizes in very tiny steps. You cannot do this with the point size because most user interfaces (eg Gnome and KDE) only allow you to enter integer point sizes like 9, 10, ... but not floating point values like 10.13. But as the resolution also influences the size, you can achieve small size changes by changing the resolution in small steps. If you do that with the font arial with hinting on, you see that the line thickness jumps from 1 pixel to 2 pixels when the resolution goes from 125 dpi to 126 dpi (while using a font size of 10 point). This is completely normal as hinting tries to fit the lines to the pixel grid. With full hinting, a vertical line will be only black with no gray at the borders and will have an integer width (1, 2, 3, .. pixels). To make this possible, a vertical line may also be moved a little bit to the left or to the right. The same happens for horizontal lines. Gray pixels are only added to diagonals to make the steps appear smoother. If you increase the size in very small increments, you will notice that at a certain size the rounding in the hinter will switch from 1 to 2 pixels. Then it becomes noticeably bolder. Without hinting you will never see a big effect when changing the font size only a tiny bit because there is no rounding and no grid fitting. Without hinting, gray pixels may be added to the left and the right of vertical lines. Depending on the grayness value, the line may appear to be for example 1.5 pixels wide when viewed from a distance where your eyes cannot resolve the single pixels anymore. But of course this reduces the contrast a lot. With full hinting you have much less gray and more black and white, i.e. much higher contrast. That is the point of hinting. Most people find that much easier to read because it looks less blurred. The downside is that this high contrast can only be achieved by distorting the glyphs a bit by rounding to integer line widths and moving the lines a little bit. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.