Re: Problem with Arial Unicode MS font for BOLD/ITALICS in PDF

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2003 - 16:29:17 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Problem with Arial Unicode MS font for BOLD/ITALICS in PDF"

    From: "Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>
    > In Windows, if you specify bold with "Arial Unicode" the Windows
    > font rasterizer will generally try to imitate bold
    > artificially - but this often looks pretty bad. Windows will
    > also try to imitate italic by slanting the font.

    The Arial Unicode MS font is particularly well "hinted", but most
    hints are unusable when the rasterizer will try to create derived
    fonts. From what I saw, it is slightly expanding the font width,
    and tries to move slightly to the left or right some points, according
    to the direction of the curve (this move is more important if the
    direction is vertical).

    For italics, I think that Windows simply uses the hinted coordinates
    and then applies an affine transform to slant the glyph. But the resulting
    hints are sometimes poorly aligned with the display grid, and characters
    may be hard to read if your display does not support subpixel
    antialiasing. The result howeer is quite good on LCD displays with this
    feature enabled.

    But it's true that complex scripts like Han will be poorly rendered in Bold
    or Italic... But does someone actually wants to read Han text with Bold
    characters (or even worse slanted with Italic) ?

    There are etter choice than Italic for Han: use a different font style, or
    reduce the point size and increase the inter-character spacing, so that
    the reduced text continues to align vertically with normal characters.

    I think that Italic is to avoid for most Asian scripts, as readers are not
    used to it. For Arabic it may cause problems because of the placement
    of diacritic points.



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