GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 119547
EPS Exporting prevents font hinting
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The current dia behaviour for exporting to EPS is simply the wrong way to approach the problem. Rather than just exporting text to the EPS file, dia renders all text as graphics by drawing the character outlines. This is a very naive approach as it prevents the EPS from benefiting from the very powerful and effective font hinting technologies in PS. For printing this is probably no so evident, but when you use the EPS to create PNG or GIF files the lack of font hinting makes all versions of dia later than 0.88 useless. The new "improved" font handling code should be thrown away and the font problems should be solved the old fashioned way - via font substitution tables (either internally in dia or externally via the system).
I totally agree. It was chosen because we could steal some code to implement it when we changed to Pango. We didn't see any code for good export from Pango to (E)PS, and at the time it wasn't feasible to ask Pango for outlines, as it was still using X fonts. It'd probably be easier now that we're totally FreeType based, but somebody still has to sit down and figure out how to get from Pango to (E)PS in a way that preserves the size of letters. If you know of somewhere we can steal the code, I'd be happy to put it in. If you can do it, I'll be double happy to let you. I cannot do it now. If PangoPDF gets to a usable state (and PDFLib gets a usable license), we'll switch to that.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 111364 ***