[Qgis-developer] Re: Fonts in map composer

[John C. Tull]

I do recall the scaling problem with symbols and lines in the earlier  
composer. I assume that an option to scale fonts will have to be added  
to the gui, so something to look for in 1.1 or the advanced editing  
branch at some point? I'll be happy to provide some feedback on your  
solutions as they are developed. Feel free to email me if you have  
something to test.

John

On Oct 28, 2008, at 1:02 AM, Marco Hugentobler wrote:

> Hi John
>
> I think Steven is right, it is a problem with the scaling of Qt  
> fonts. There
> was a similar problem with composer labels (text boxes that can be  
> placed in
> print composer). The solution there was to request fonts in larger  
> size and
> scale the painter down before applying QPainter::drawText.
>
> It should be possible to do the same for labels printed on the map.  
> I created
> a ticket for this (#1379)
>
> Regards,
> Marco
>
> Am Dienstag 28 Oktober 2008 05:10:49 schrieb Steven Bell:
>> I've observed the character spacing issue before.  My slightly- 
>> educated
>> guess is that it's a Qt font-rendering deficiency related to using  
>> really
>> small fonts (similar to the font-garbling issue) - as far as I  
>> know, the
>> drawing code is using all floating-point precision.
>> Steven
>>
>>> Marco,
>>>
>>> First, thanks for all the wonderful improvements to the map  
>>> composer.
>>> This is now quite stable and usable for production quality maps.
>>>
>>> One of the last remaining issues is the quality of fonts in printed
>>> maps. Here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/67875808@N00/2979503270/ )
>>> are sample outputs using qgis and mapserver. Note the fonts and  
>>> buffer
>>> are antialiased in mapserver (right), but not in qgis (left). This
>>> makes labels for small font sizes quite unattractive. Also, note  
>>> that
>>> the characters are not spaced evenly.
>>>
>>> Is there a way to have antialiasing available for all font sizes?  
>>> (Is
>>> there a cutoff size for antialiased fonts?) Both maps use Arial, a
>>> standard TrueType font on my system (Mac OS X). I had to select font
>>> size 8 in qgis (yet it is still too large); mapserver is using a
>>> larger size (font size 12). I tried with a larger canvas and larger
>>> fonts, but things did not improve a great deal and the file size and
>>> computation time grew considerably.
>>>
>>> If you have any insights or ideas on this, I'd love to hear them.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> John
>
>
>
> -- 
> Dr. Marco Hugentobler
> Institute of Cartography
> ETH Zurich
> Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee
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