Truetype font rendering changes

[woodbri]

Johan Forsman has reported the following problem:

I am in the process of migrating from MapServer 5.4 (FGS95 on Linux) to MapServer 6 (MS4W3 on Windows Server 2008 R2). Most things are migrating well however I have a peculiar TrueType font rendering issue where the readability on the new system is far less than on the old system. I have attached two screenshots taken at the same scale to illustrate the issue. In these images the parish labels are Arial Bold Italic 6 pt., the interstate shields are Arial 8 pt., and US highway shields are Arial Narrow 7 pt. The TTF files and the MAP files were copied directly from the old system to the new system. I have tried with antialias on and off in the label definition and with a couple of different AGG image output formats but there are no visible differences.

He has provided a test case that reproduces this issue it can be downloaded here:
http://imaptools.com:8080/dl/tt_render_sample.tar.gz

There is more discussion on the users list with subject "Truetype font rendering changes"

[tbonfort]

I suspect freetype versions are different on the platforms, along with different (freetype) compilation options that might have included or discarded some feature from the freetype builds. Basically nothing has changed in mapserver concerning the freetype/truetype access, so closing this bug as there's nothing we can do about it.