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Small Point Size and Hinting

Q: I am having a problem, apparent at very small font sizes (6 points and below), with the output quality of some fonts that emerge from a GX vector driver.

My application uses gxLayouts for text display and editing. If I create my output using GXDrawShape to render the layout shapes, the small characters begin to look very crude: character height varies by about 30% between some letters and curved letterforms degenerate to rough polygons.

A: Layouts (like all typographic shapes) have hints turned on by default. If the font you're using isn't hinted at small point sizes, using hints messes up the appearance of the text, rather than helping it (as they should). Try using the layout shape and setting the gxNoMetricsGridText and gxNoContourGridText bits on in the textAttributes. The results at small sizes should be better.

[Apr 08 1996]

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