On Sun, 11 Dec 2005 09:29:54 -0600, Peter Olcott wrote:

Why is it when I type fff in Bold Italic 24 Point Times New Roman that the first
two letters are closer together than the last two letters?

Thanks


See if the description below helps...

Bob S

In older systems, Microsoft used a program called GDI to lay out text
for drawing on the screen. In newer systems Microsoft uses a program
called GDIPlus.

The new program uses something called "resolution-independent" layout.
See article 307208 called "Why text appears different when drawn with
GDIPlus versus GDI". "resolution-independent" is a misleading name;
the layout is in fact very dependent on resolution. What Microsoft has
actually done is make the length of the text independent of the
resolution. This ensures that line breaks in dialog boxes (for
example) occur at the same place no matter what the resolution of the
target device. The cost is poor rendering of text in certain
circumstances.

The article has a long explanation; here is a short version. Fonts
contain descriptions of the outlines of text glyphs. They also contain
"hints" to tell the rendering engine what to do on low resolution
displays (i.e. screens). One of the things that these hints tell the
rendering engine is how to slide the glyph outline around so that it
lines up with the pixel positions. This is called "grid fitting". This
avoids the horrible problems that result if the outline ends up
halfway between pixel positions. (Should it turn on both pixels,
making the character too wide, or neither, making it disappear, or€¦)
Both the character outline, and the "bounding box" that says how wide
the character is, will be lined up with the pixel grid.

The process of lining up the (carefully designed) bounding box with
the (relatively coarse) pixel grid can make the bounding box slightly
too wide or too narrow. For example, the "w" tends to come out too
narrow and "l" tends to come out too wide. This tends to average out
in ordinary text, but if you have a string of the same letter the
slight errors will add up, resulting in a large error in the length of
the string. Since one of the goals of GDIPlus is to not have errors in
the length of the string, something must be done.

What GDIPlus does is to add or remove space one pixel width at a time
to force the line length to come out correctly. If GDIPlus wants to
make a line longer, it will add up to one em of white space at the end
of the line, then increase space between words, then increase space
between characters. If GDIPlus wants to shorten a line, it reduces
space between words and then between characters.

(Note: If you have anti-aliasing turned on, these effects do not
happen; instead the text is made to look fuzzy.)

If you want to experiment with the effects, one thing to try is typing
a long string of "i" or "l" in 8-point Bold in Arial. Notice that some
of the characters are jammed together. You can also try typing a long
string of "w" in 8-point Bold in Courier New. Also look at a long
string of "ci" in 8-point Verdana.

Text was more legible under the old GDI system.