SDL doesn't cope well with FreeSans

[Carl Banks]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> Whenever I try to use the FreeSans font with SDL,
> either through PyGame or Soya, I get disappointing
> results. The characters come out slightly
> higglety-pigglety -- randomly displaced up or down
> a pixel or so from the baseline.
>
> Something about the calculation of the font height
> seems to be off, too.
>
> The fonts that come with MacOSX don't have these
> problems, so the fault doesn't seem to be with SDL
> or FreeType.
>
> Has anyone else noticed this? If it's a problem
> with the quality of FreeSans, can anyone recommend
> a free Helvetica-like font family that doesn't
> have this problem?

It would depend on how you're displaying them, I would think.  I
haven't seen any one-pixel-off errors for FreeSans on the screen at the
same time, but I've seen differences between Windows and Linux.  (I
figured it was because of hinting, but didn't investigate.)  However,
I'm rendering it with OpenGL textures, so there might be a little
difference.

1. Try increasing the pixel height by 0.5
2. Convert it to a type 1 font and see if the problem remains.
3. See if anyone on the SDL or PyGame lists know anything about it.


Carl Banks