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Old 02-04-2011, 05:46 AM   #10
kacir
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Join Date: May 2006
Device: PocketBook 360, before it was Sony Reader, cassiopeia A-20
Quote:
Originally Posted by Histerius View Post
Maybe they made their own version of Caecilia.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie View Post
Very, very, very unlikely for a variety of reasons including copyright infringement.
They DID make their own version of Caecilia. At the very least they have modified Caecilia heavily, and they have bundled actual bitmaps inside the font file. Normally, the font is "hinted" or "instructed" - hinting is a short code in language similar to assembler for each letter that tells rendering engine how to round dimensions so the letter boundaries fall exactly to the pixel grid. This is absolutely crucial if you want to have text on a low resolution display(*) to look crisp, sharp and with highest possible contrast. Amazon went one step further and included actual hand tweaked, I believe(**), bitmaps for certain letter sizes (the default sizes)

I have used Font Matrix program to have a look at the actual Caecilia font copied from Kindle 3.

(*) Do not argue! 166dpi IS a very low resolution from a typographic point of view ;-)
(**) well, if you look at capital "T" the left and right "arms" of T are not symmetric, which is typical for hinted fonts. For some reason, that escapes me, auto-generated hinting info for typical T letter doesn't contain code to make sure that T letter is symmetrical. When you print the text using the same font in high resolution from Corel Draw, for example, the "T" is symmetrical. I would expect that hand optimized bitmaps should avoid this problem.
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