I'm using The Gimp to try to recreate some images containing only text for a web site that I maintain for my company. The site was originally created by a web design company using Dreamweaver and some other tools. Unfortunately all I could get out of them regarding the fonts used in the images is that they used Univers Condensed (47,57,67) fonts from Adobe. I've purchased the fonts, and have managed to recreate some of the images to a point that's visually acceptable. Now I'm stuck on a particular image.

The problem is that the look of the font within The Gimp is similar but not the same as what is in the original image. The main problem is that the lower case letters are about half the size of the upper case letters, whereas in the original image they are about 2 thirds of the upper case letters. I've played around with turning hinting on and off, and forcing the auto-hinter, but not much luck, as expected.

I thought a font was a font was a font. Well, as long as you're working with the same font. Am I not right? Is it possible that the font is being rendered differently on my system compared to the original designers'?

Any suggestions on what I could do? I need to be able to recreate these images so that I can provide a translation of the site.

Technical details: OS: Linux - Fedora Core 4
gimp: 2.2.12
freetype: 2.1.9
fontconfig: 2.2.3
xorg-x11: 6.8.2

TIA.
Owen

On 9/5/06, Carol Spears wrote:

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 01:51:58PM -0400, Owen Berry wrote:

I'm using The Gimp to try to recreate some images containing only text for a web site that I maintain for my company. The site was originally created by a web design company using Dreamweaver and some other tools. Unfortunately all I could get out of them regarding the fonts used in the images is that they used Univers Condensed (47,57,67) fonts from Adobe. I've purchased the fonts, and have managed to recreate some of the images to a point that's visually acceptable. Now I'm stuck on a particular image.

The problem is that the look of the font within The Gimp is similar but not the same as what is in the original image. The main problem is that the lower case letters are about half the size of the upper case letters, whereas in the original image they are about 2 thirds of the upper case letters. I've played around with turning hinting on and off, and forcing the auto-hinter, but not much luck, as expected.

I thought a font was a font was a font. Well, as long as you're working with the same font. Am I not right? Is it possible that the font is being rendered differently on my system compared to the original designers'?

unfortunately, this is not the case. many applications will stretch and make into italic fonts that were not designed that way.

i spent sometime considering this, if i were a font artist. i determined that i would probably not like this after i had spent so much time making a font. so this was always one of the things i liked about the way that GIMP managed fonts. there is so much respect for the font artist.

i hear that now fonts are considered 'software' and not art officially. not to me though. so the official terminology/definition disagrees with mine. if what i heard is accurate.

Any suggestions on what I could do? I need to be able to recreate these images so that I can provide a translation of the site.

the gimp freetype plug-in can probably do this. it still will take a little determination on your part, however.

http://freetype.gimp.org

and if you make the graphics this way, understand that you will be recreating the same problem for your successor as you are having now, maybe.

the adobe software, naturally, will be able to exchange the information about the font mangling from application to application.

it is font mangling, however.

carol

Yes, I've decided that there is some font mangling going on, and it's particularly obvious with smaller font sizes, which is why I'm having trouble with this image with a font size of 12px. I tried the freetype plugin, and I can make the text look much closer by stretching it vertically. Cool! Now I just need to increase the opacity.

I'm taking careful notes of what I'm doing, for myself as well as anybody else who works on this. Hopefully that will help, especially as all the software is freely available.

Thanks for the help.

Owen