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Date:	Sun, 21 Nov 2004 20:55:41 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: OS2.INI PM_Font_Drivers ?

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Steven Levine wrote:
>
> Both are Bezier. See:
>
> http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/ttvst1.html

A very good link, thanks for this. (Lurkers: the above article is well
worth reading.)

The above page notes that Truetype is quadratic (three control points)
while Adobe is cubic (four control points). I know from my own work
with Bezier curves that four is a _lot_ better than three -- you can
actually accomplish something with them. (The old DOS-based Turbo
Pascal from Borland came with source code for designing Bezier curves
with a real-time display and you could use up to nine control points to
create the line images.)

> TTF fonts shipped with WINOS2 are low quality. The high
> quality TTF fonts, such as the so-called MS web fonts,
> are comparable in size to the PostScript fonts.

I do have a 13 MB TTF font in my \OS2\DLL\ directory:

3-30-99 6:49p 12892504 0 tnrmt30.ttf

I wasn't sure where it came from so I ran PMSeek. Turns out it came
with Java 1.1.8.

Next I checked PM_Fonts and it's registered. But my Font Palette
doesn't see it, at least by that name. Hmm, might it have a "long
name"? I opened it in EPM but didn't see any obvious "long name" in
the file.

Is there a way to look inside this file and see what fonts it contains?
I could install it but I don't remember how to uninstall a font file.

> >The PostScript files, being larger, must contain more rendering info.
>
> Without knowing the encoding method, there is no basis for this statement.
> What if the TTF font encoding is LZW compressed internally?

The article you cite above gives a good insight although no clear
answer. The TTF files may optionally contain target platform
information which the TTF renderer may use; Type 1 instead relies on the
renderer to make intelligent decisions irrespective of target platform.

Thus, a smaller TTF file may simply not contain any of the optional
hinting.

My perception is that the TTF font faces are lower quality (quadratic
rather than cubic control) and require much more hinting to compensate
for the "pulled curves" of a quadratic rather than the Type 1 "sweeping
curves" of a cubic.

> IIRC, I'm pretty sure PostScript came before TrueType.
>
> http://www.visiongraphics-inc.com/tools/fonttech.html
>
> seems to support this recollection.

A good summary, thanks.

Many years ago I was going to purchase the PostScript developer specs
until Adobe told me the book cost $1500. I don't recall if that
included font renderer algorithms.

- Peter

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