Tor Andersson
Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:58:43 -0700
On 8/27/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Tor, Thanks for taking the time to respond, and sorry for the double post. I accidently sent from the wrong email address, but apparently somebody was nice enough to approve it for posting. If I'm reading your post correctly, you're basically saying that getting text that looks the way I want is hopeless. I'm very sensitive to font appearance, but I'm not intimately familiar with all the terminology. It sounds like Linux has an API limitation? And this API limitation is what in turn makes the fonts look so miserable? (In my view.)
The primary API limitation is the integer only coordinates. That is because when Xft was designed, the primary concern was being able to port over old apps quickly, and all old X11 apps assume that font metrics are snapped to integer coordinates. Why Gtk+ and KDE also do so, you'll have to ask someone else. I had hoped that Pango would be able to do the right thing, but no...
Regarding turning off hinting, wasn't that the default setting under FC5? I'm fairly sure I experimented around with turning on hinting (auto/bytecode) because the FC5 default was off. I wasn't happy with the FC5 default settings, not by a long shot.
I seriously doubt that FC5 (or any distro, for that matter) would default to unhinted. Last time I installed Ubuntu, even the option in the GUI preference dialog that says "best shapes" gave me hinted text. I had to resort to hacking my own .fonts.conf.
If true, this sucks for me, because frankly, fonts are a big deal to me. I have to stare at them nonstop. I would nearly kill to get a browser that looks like Safari (or another OS X WebKit-based browser) under Linux. Even under OS X, Mozilla-based browsers have horrendous kerning - particularly of italic serif fonts. I love the feature set, but the kerning turns me off - despite using the system anti-aliasing - so I can't stand to use Mozilla more than the bare minimum.
FWIW, Safari also snaps text to pixel coordinates (because the KHTML base did so) and as a result Safari text looks more uneven than text using the native Cocoa APIs for text drawing.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I think one the largest barriers to using Linux on the desktop for me is the maddening font rendering quality. Where precisely is the problem coming in? Would it be possible to use an alternative desktop or window manager to get around it?
Aye. It's the number one reason I don't use Linux very much. Can't stand the text rendering :( That, and the lack of margins in the terminal emulators. My pet hate is text that bumps up right against the window border.
I did look at the examples you showed me. The first example looks somewhat better than what I normally see under Linux. The kerning is pleasant and the anti-aliasing appears to be strong enough to offer an accurate rendering of the text for that point size, although it has a distinctly soft/blurry look compared to 10.4's subpixel anti- aliasing, much like fonts looked under earlier versions of Mac OS X. I would be curious how well those settings work across a wide range of fonts.
That's because it is the same blurry fonts as earler versions of Mac OS X. Mac OS X also used to apply (so I have discovered by empirical testing) a gamma of 1.4 to its text, which significantly improves the appearance of black text on a white background (and also fucks up white text on a black background). I haven't looked into 10.4, so I can't say for sure there.
Any additional thoughts/suggestions?
Start a campaign. I think there may be enough people interested in good font rendering that we can make a change if we put our hearts in it. (But don't hope for too much) Feel free to contact me on or off this list if you have any further questions. I don't follow the usual linux mailing lists very much. Tor _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list Freetype@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype