New subject: GreenVille font, is it still available? I have a question about it.

11 Jan 2007

      Hi, i finally got response from Larry Snyder (aka wierd_w ),  who created Greenville font. (appeared he was on holiday). Below is the mail he sent me, and i talked to him on  irc about it. To summarize, he's willing  to license this  LGPL, but  reading his mail it seems to me this won't be a one day fix ;) What he writes further is quite a bit beyond  my knowledge of  fonts, so i really hope on of the wine developers  who know  something about fonts could  read the mail and tell what could be done, or how things should be done. Thanks in advance,Louis

Wierd_w <wierd_w(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 
--- "Louis. Lenders" 
wrote:
...
Hi, i got your email address from one of the Reactos
developers. AFAIK you have been working on a Tahoma
compatible font called Greenville. I was wondering
if you still have it, and if you were willing to
license this LGPL, so that it could be included in
Wine project.
Sure I could. I would be happy to release the glyphset
that I have started on, but the reason I never
finished the project was because of "Differences"
between the rasterizers in FreeType and MS Windows. 
These differences would have required me to learn
native truetype assembler to resolve, because of (in
my opinion) "overzealous" freetype developers
attempting to take full advantage of the hint system's
tolerances.

(Better explanation: MS Windows' rasterizer only
blends to 16 shades of grey, instead of the
theoretical maximum of 256 shades. There is a REASON
for doing this: Namely, it makes it possible for
visual hinting systems, like the software that I used
to work on Greenville, to produce a visually
high-quality font, without using exact binary
precision with the use of hinting instructions; It
allows for a degree of "leniency" in the rasterizer's
interperetation of a glyph outline.  Because Freetype
wants to use the full theoretical maximum to achieve
more shades of grey, you must be "Spot on dead on the
money" accurate with the use of hinting instructions,
or else the font will have 'blurry' edges. Throw into
that the fact that the "Delta" instruction is patented
by Apple computer corporation, and refuses to sell
Freetype a license, it makes it VERY VERY VERY
difficult to get Freetype to even render the glyph
even kind-of correctly to begin with.  It is possible
to 'patch' freetype to turn off some of this
overzealousness, and even to turn on the native
bytecode interpereter-- but even then the test case
TTF files I generated (that look just fine in windows)
look asthetically gut-wrenching in freetype.)

After spending 6 months trying (and failing) to
resolve these internal rendering troubles, (and even
considering the implementation of Scalar Bitmaps
(SBIT)data so that I wouldnt HAVE to mess with
Freetype's CRAP, and ending up with a 600kb font
file.) I decided that enough was enough.

Since the software that I used was VERY expensive
(over 300$ US for the STUDENT DISCOUNTED version), and
uses a proprietary working format, I would instead be
happy to send you the glyph metrics and kerning data
in Adobe format, and the actual Glyph set in your
choice of vector format. (Note, I spent 2 weeks
looking for a suitable TTF editing suite from the
freesoftware community (You know, one that would
*gasp!* Run on windows, where I could quickly test the
fonts!), and came up empty handed. this is why I
shelled out the big bucks for FontLab. The Free
Software community's gestalt predjudices have shot it
in the foot this time.)

The actual HINTING process would then be up to you,
but be prepared to have your hair turn grey, and to
develop ulcers.  In order to achieve a strong level of
clean resemblence to Tahoma, you *WILL* need to use
Truetype, OR, a bitmapped font set. Adobe Type-1 fonts
(God, so many tools for that in the FOSS community,
but not a SINGLE ONE for TTF hints!...) will not be
suitable, because they lack the necessary hinting
control (Only stem and leaf, instead of Vector Node
Deform, like TTF-- Means that round contours, like in
the letter O or G, will NEVER be as clean in an adobe
type-1, as they will be with TTF.)

I am currently at the college, and dont have access to
my software at the moment, but when I get home this
evening I will begin cleaning up my old resources and
packaging them.

Any particular preference on a vector format? I CAN
package the raw glyphs into an unhinted Adobe Type-1,
but you will have to do a vector conversion to work on
them as a TTF. That shouldnt be a problem though.
Likewise, I could also send an unhinted TTF, with the
kerning data allready merged. If one of these would be
suitable, let me know, and if not-- please specify
one.

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Re: GreenVille font, is it still available? I have a question about it.

Louis. Lenders

Markus Amsler

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