Anti aliased fonts in wine - minimum font size

[Aric Stewart]

Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Mike Kaplinskiy
> <mike.kaplinskiy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think some time ago this was explained as a NOTABUG in freetype,
>> which actually obeys the font's preferences and if the font supplies
>> special images for smaller font sizes, it uses them WITHOUT aliasing
>> them, which seems logical. Windows seems to lazily alias everything.
>>
>> If you can find a way to disable embedded bitmaps it might help. The
>> related bug is at
>> https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=21205
> 
> Hmm, thanks for the link.  If I understand correctly, that only seems
> to be important for the newer "cleartype" fonts.  I'm just using plain
> Times New Roman.
> 
> Updated information: if I load up gedit (the gnome text editor) and
> tell it to use Times New Roman 12, it *is* anti-aliased (depending on
> my settings in gnome-control-center).  However, the exact same font
> isn't anti-aliased in wine.
> 
> Does wine use fontconfig to pick up this stuff?
> 
> Avery
> 

All our glyphs come from freetype directly. So it is the freetype 
library that makes that decision.

A quick search on freetype and cleartype shows this 
http://david.freetype.org/cleartype-patents.html

Looks like it is a big patent mess.

But in short I do not think this is a wine issue but more a freetype 
issue.  It looks like there are special parameters that could be passed 
to FT_Open_Face to force hinting (looking at the freetype release 
notes).  But that would require a bit more investigation if you are 
interested. And then you would have to prove when windows does this.

thanks!
-aric