Font rasterization

Font rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description (as found in scalable fonts such as TrueType fonts) to a raster or bitmap description. This often involves some anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read. It may also involve hinting—information embedded in the font data that optimizes rendering details for particular character sizes.

The simplest form of rasterization is simple line-drawing with no anti-aliasing of any sort. In Microsoft's terminology, this is called bi-level (and more popularly "black and white") rendering because no intermediate shades (of gray) are used to draw the glyphs. (In fact, any two colors can be used as foreground and background.) This form of rendering is also called aliased or "jagged". This is the fastest rendering method in the sense that it requires the least computational effort. However, it has the disadvantage that rendered glyphs may lose definition and become hard to recognize at small sizes. Therefore, many font data files (such as TrueType) contain hints that help the rasterizer decide where to render pixels for particularly troublesome areas in the glyphs, or sets of hand-tweaked bitmaps to use at specific pixel sizes. As prototypical example, all versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 95 (e.g. Windows 3.1) only provided this type of built-in rasterizer.

A more complicated approach is to use standard anti-aliasing techniques from computer graphics. This can be thought of as determining, for each pixel at the edges of the character, how much of that pixel the character occupies, and drawing that pixel with that degree of opacity. For example, when drawing a black letter on a white background, if a pixel ideally should be half filled (perhaps by a diagonal line from corner to corner) it is drawn 50% gray. Over-simple application of this procedure can produce blurry glyphs. For example, if the letter includes a vertical line that should be one pixel wide but falls exactly between two pixels, it appears on screen as a two-pixel-wide gray line. This blurriness trades clarity for accuracy. However, modern systems often force lines to fall within integral pixel coordinates, which makes glyphs look sharper, but also makes lines slightly wider or thinner than they would have looked on a printed sheet of paper.

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