Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
I agree that Sony should have included more font options, but I believe JS Wolf was talking about the rendering, not the options. In which case, one can legitimately point out that it's relatively easy to add new fonts to the Sony reader (I even have a blog tutorial! Yay!), but it's NOT relatively easy to make the N2 rendering better.*
* Assuming that JS Wolf is right that the N2 rendering is poor. I have no experience with the device and therefore no opinion to offer.
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Let me see if I can shed some more light on this, because I think all this talk about the Sony and Nook having different 'font rendering engines' is completely off base.
I mentioned before that it's a pretty good guess that B&N is using the standard Android font rendering engine in the Nook Simple Touch (which is based on freetype). This is a good bet, because the freetype rendering engine is as good as any on the planet right now and is used in Android and virtually ALL Linux distributions, so I doubt that B&N would have found any reason to look elsewhere.
Now, if you check your Sony's PDF user manual on page 119 you will find a short acknowledgment that 'freetype' is also used in the Sony. (freetype is one of the GPL licensed free opensource software technologies that Sony 'borrowed' [ripped off] for the PRS-650)
The freetype rendering engine is very sophisticated and has a lot of features, and therefore a lot of options that can be tweaked.
Chances are, that any differences that JS saw were simply caused by freetype being set up with slightly different options enabled.
The N2 developers may have fallen into the trap of enabling 'strong hinting' in freetype, which is sometimes recommend for black and white monochrome displays.
"Hinting" was conceived to help the font rendering engine figure out how to move pixels around to keep the font legible at smaller type sizes back in the old days with 1bit/pixel monochrome displays.
The problem is that phrase 'black and white monochrome,' is very slippery in English.
For example, when you see an old style television image or photograph described as 'black and white', what you were really looking at was a
gray-scale image, not one made up of only two values, black and white.
It turns out that the above advice about 'strong hinting', is ONLY applicable to displays that can truly only render two values - black or white - NOT to gray-scale displays.
Modern displays all use multiple bits/pixel, and this allows fonts to also be smoothed and made more readable at smaller sizes via another technique called 'anti-aliasing' (by introducing intermediate brightness pixel levels around the edges.)
The font rendering engine deals with the complicated task of shrinking a font down and rendering it, by using a combination of 'hinting' (moving pixels around to better positions) and 'anti-aliasing' (intermediate value pixels around the edges).
The eInk displays in both the Sony and Nook allow 16 level gray scale which is more than enough for effective anti-aliasing of fonts, so for these devices, the best font rendering will involve some combination of very light 'hinting' and 'anti-aliasing'.
Telling freetype to use heavier 'hinting' gives thiner higher contrast characters, but tends to change the shapes of letters slightly as pixels are moved around to more optimum positions by the hinting algorithm.
Relying on light hinting plus anti-aliasing gives fonts that are much truer to shape, but which are slightly lower in contrast at light stroke weights, and softer around the edges.
And if this isn't confusing enough, to add to the confusion, there are variations in how freetype does hinting . . .
Until recently, there were software patent issues with the freetype rendering engine being able to legally use the special 'hinting' bytecode that is embedded within a truetype font, so the freetype developers instead came up with a very sophisticated 'auto-hinter' to move the font's pixels around automatically at smaller type sizes without using the font's embedded hinting info.
In 2010 all the patent restrictions on hinting bytecode expired, so now the freetype rendering engine is technically able to use the hinting bytecode included with most truetype fonts by the font's developers (but ironically sometimes the auto-hinter still works better, so it's still available as well).
So, there are a LOT of options . . .
Should we use Strong hinting, medium, or light?
Should the hinting use the fonts official hinting bytecode, or the auto-hinting algorithm built into freetype?
How should anti-aliasing be handled?
. . . as you can see, this gets a little complicated.
A little complicated, but not TOO complicated . . .
So if some of the freetype options need to be tweaked, I am sure that B&N will figure it out.
And if not, we ARE talking about Android - and the Nook STR HAS BEEN ROOTED - so if necessary, you should be able to change the font rendering settings yourself.