Bug 8605

Hello everybody.

When True Type font doesn't have a Bold style and Bold is
emulated, it is done in suboptimal way, that is: when Bold
style is emulated on a bitmapped font, the characters are 
rendered beautifully, but when emulation is done on a True
Type font, characters are rendered noticeably worse - they 
have jagged edges, are emboldened in a non-uniform way etc.

Here is a discussion which I had on a freetype mailing list,
where solution were proposed:


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Question:

Generally, X renders .ttf fonts exactly as Windows does, but there is
the following problem: usually .ttf file for a particular font contains
a number of styles: Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic, so that when
application uses bold font, it uses Bold style instead of Regular. But
when .ttf doesn't contain Bold style, for example, and bold font is
required, boldness is emulated. Now, Windows emulates boldness perfectly,
but X does it really badly. For example, see the difference between Windows
and X in bold font rendering in the following screnshots:

Windows: http://xt.nm.ru/monaco-win-10pt_1.tif
Linux: http://xt.nm.ru/monaco-lin-10pt.tif

The font used in a screenshot is Monaco (.ttf version), but there
is the same problem with other fonts which don't have Bold style
"built-in", for example Ariel Mono and others.

I use libfreetype 2.2.1 (Ubuntu Edgy).

Is it possible somehow to improve the situation? 
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Response (by David Turner):

The problem is in the client libraries using FreeType to render the
text. 2.2.1 provides both outline and bitmap emboldening functions,
and the latter is capable of generating output exactly equal to your
"good" screenshot.

more precisely, the problem is that these libraries only use the
vector emboldening algorithm, which only gives satisfying results
with anti-aliase text.

I would provide a patch if I had time, I recommend you to file
bugs against libXft, Cairo, and probably OpenOffice.org if this
is a big concern to you.
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As adviced, I submit that bug both to Cairo and to LibXft.