making fonts look same in Ghostscript and X11



My application writes text to X11 display and to PostScript output. I
want the rendered output by Ghostscript on that same X11 display to
look *exactly* (identical pixels) like it does in my X11 app.

But even if I use exactly the same Type 1 font (Times Roman 18,
which on my system maps "Nimbus Roman No 9 L" from URW) for
both X11 and PostScript output, there are noticeable differences,
especially in the spaces between letters and words, but even in
the rendering for individual glyphs.

It's easy to illustrate the discrepancy (this is on Fedora Core 3,
Xorg 6.8.1.902, GNU Ghostscript 7.07, 100dpi display). Compare:

% cat hello.ps
/Times-Roman findfont 18 scalefont setfont
10 10 moveto (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.) show
% gs -g800x50 -sDEVICE=x11 hello.ps

TO

% xmessage -fn
'-urw-nimbus roman no9 l-medium-r-normal--18-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1'
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

On my system, they're not even close. Larger fonts match a bit better,
but it's never anywhere near identical.

Questions:

1. Is this to be expected? The same Type 1 font will be rendered with
significant differences by X vs GhostScript? Why? Does the font data
leave a lot of specifics up to the individual rendering engine?

2. What are my choices for making Ghostscript and X11 match perfectly
(or as best as possible)? I'm not wedded to Type 1 fonts or even
X11 - my app just needs to manipulate text on a display, and then create
PostScript that when rendered on that display looks the way it did in
my app. Suggestions (short of embeeding Ghostcript in my app)?

Thanks,
-usman


.



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