Text

[Kent-24]

Is it normal for GIMp to have such poor quality Text?

I switched Hinting Aliasing and auto hinter on. Still not very good.

[Kent Paul Dolan]

> From: "Kent" <kent4jmj@...>
> Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:11:53 -0000

> Is it normal for GIMp to have such poor quality
> Text?

You must have some pretty high standards, or else
must be trying to use fairly small text. I find that
a use of the kerning and leading controls lets me
set type that I like a lot, and I used to write
typesetting software.

Gimp is focused around TrueType, pretty much the
industry default standard. In part then the quality
of text you see is based on the quality of TrueType
fonts you have available.

If I understand correctly (not always the case),
GIMP internally is using a library called "pango" to
handle that text, and that library is used not just
by GIMP but by a large assortment of other
MS-Windows and Linux tools. There would be a chorus
of complaints if that library were rendering
TrueType fonts' text particularly badly for everyone.

> I switched Hinting Aliasing and auto hinter on.

Did you try doing that as two superposed text
layers, one with and one without those feature
enabled, and then doing a "difference" mode merge of
the two layers to see if the controls were having
any effect at all for you?

> Still not very good.

Well, one approach is just to render the text at big
point sizes, which usually render prettier, but then
scale the text layer small to fit where you intend
to use it. I do that quite a lot.

xanthian, a.k.a. Kent Paul Dolan ;-)

[Kent-24]

The Scaling idea sounds like a good place to start. Thanks.



--- In gimpwin-users@..., Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@...>
wrote:

>
> > From: "Kent" <kent4jmj@...>
> > Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:11:53 -0000
>
> > Is it normal for GIMp to have such poor quality
> > Text?
>
> You must have some pretty high standards, or else
> must be trying to use fairly small text. I find that
> a use of the kerning and leading controls lets me
> set type that I like a lot, and I used to write
> typesetting software.
>
> Gimp is focused around TrueType, pretty much the
> industry default standard. In part then the quality
> of text you see is based on the quality of TrueType
> fonts you have available.
>
> If I understand correctly (not always the case),
> GIMP internally is using a library called "pango" to
> handle that text, and that library is used not just
> by GIMP but by a large assortment of other
> MS-Windows and Linux tools. There would be a chorus
> of complaints if that library were rendering
> TrueType fonts' text particularly badly for everyone.
>
> > I switched Hinting Aliasing and auto hinter on.
>
> Did you try doing that as two superposed text
> layers, one with and one without those feature
> enabled, and then doing a "difference" mode merge of
> the two layers to see if the controls were having
> any effect at all for you?
>
> > Still not very good.
>
> Well, one approach is just to render the text at big
> point sizes, which usually render prettier, but then
> scale the text layer small to fit where you intend
> to use it. I do that quite a lot.
>
> xanthian, a.k.a. Kent Paul Dolan ;-)
>