[clue-tech] gimp fonts for [printed] graphics

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2004-12-23 at 00:22, Jeff Cann wrote:
> Is photoshop a vector program?  Other people I know use it for CMYK.  Just 
> curious.

Technically its mostly a raster program.  However it has vector support
for fonts and paths.  There is no reason why Adobe couldn't have added
complete vector support to Photoshop instead of Illustrator except that
a) that would be feature overkill and make the application difficult to
learn and b) they get to sell two applications instead of one.

It also probably would have been (potentially) much slower and require
bigger hardware just to run it.

CMYK is the colorspace used by printers.  It isn't supported well in
GIMP because GIMP still doesn't do 16 bit pixels.  16 bit pixel support
is required for doing multiple colorspaces (not just CMYK) and the GIMP
developers decided that doing it right would be better than just hacking
in CMYK support.  The drawback, of course, is that "doing it right" has
taken 5+ years and still isn't implemented.  Cross your fingers that the
2.3/2.4 release cycle will get the foundation (re: GEGL) implemented.

> > Do they look jagged on screen or when you do a test print? 
> 
> Jagged on screen but decent on my [very old] HP Deskjet 722c.

Jagged on screen but not in print is a different issue. That could be
either a poor font or bad support for font rendering (at least for that
particular font) in the software.

Note that wordprocessors send text to printers in Postscript format,
which means they tell the printer what text to print and either the font
to use or information about the font that lets the printer RIP the text
into a printable image.  RIP is "Raster Image Processor" and essentially
means converting a postscript program (or a program in the language the
printer understands since not all printers understand postscript) into
an image.

This is different than what GIMP does.  GIMP is the RIPPER - it
rasterizes the font itself and only sends pixel information to the
printer (wrapped in postscript but without any vector information for
text and fonts).  The GIMP-Print plugin (now renamed to GutenPrint, I
believe, or something similar) can probably handle sending font
information to the printer.  The problem is that GIMP doesn't send that
information.  It rasterizes the whole image and sends it to the printing
software.  By the time the printer gets it the font and text are just a
bunch of pixels.

I don't know if Photoshop sends text as text+font or as rasterized
image.  Illustrator sends everything to the printing software as
postscript, which makes sending the text+fonts much easier.

> Yes, thanks Matt for the links.  Paying $50 for a good set of fonts is 
> probably worth it.  I'll check it out.

Really good fonts are more than that actually, but a decent set of fonts
for simple brochures can be had for $50.  My wife has paid in the
hundreds for the fonts she uses on brochures for corporate clients. 
Verdana is a good web font.  It shows up cleanly on pretty much all
modern monitors.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel           
The Graphics Muse             Why do we say something is out of whack?  
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org    What is a whack?
http://www.ximba.org