<div>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.<br>
Steven<br><br> </div><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">Marco,<br><br>
First, thanks for all the wonderful improvements to the map composer.<br>
This is now quite stable and usable for production quality maps.<br><br>
One of the last remaining issues is the quality of fonts in printed<br>
maps. Here ( <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/67875808@N00/2979503270/" target="_blank">http://www.flickr.com/photos/67875808@N00/2979503270/</a> )<br>
are sample outputs using qgis and mapserver. Note the fonts and buffer<br>
are antialiased in mapserver (right), but not in qgis (left). This<br>
makes labels for small font sizes quite unattractive. Also, note that<br>
the characters are not spaced evenly.<br><br>
Is there a way to have antialiasing available for all font sizes? (Is<br>
there a cutoff size for antialiased fonts?) Both maps use Arial, a<br>
standard TrueType font on my system (Mac OS X). I had to select font<br>
size 8 in qgis (yet it is still too large); mapserver is using a<br>
larger size (font size 12). I tried with a larger canvas and larger<br>
fonts, but things did not improve a great deal and the file size and<br>
computation time grew considerably.<br><br>
If you have any insights or ideas on this, I'd love to hear them.<br><br>
Cheers,<br>
John<br></blockquote>
<br>