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@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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