[Qgis-developer] Re: Fonts in map composer

[Marco Hugentobler]

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