Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
On Thursday, May 4, 2023 6:28:47 PM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: > Below 12ppem, essentially *all* fonts, whether they are serif or > sans-serif, look exactly the same – there are simply not enough > possibilities to position the pixels differently and still maintain > legibility. You might simply use a single bitmap font instead. That's where my roots are and what got replaced when I discovered hinting in well-designed ttf's like Verdana. And hinted Ubuntu (before the regression) is different enough to make that my preferred desktop font for the moment. Oh well, taste... Martin
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
> Below 12ppem, essentially *all* fonts, whether they are serif or > sans-serif, look exactly the same I mean: with bi-level rendering. Werner
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
> [...] I also think nothing beats a well hinted font @9 points on a > full-HD laptop screen which are still plenty around? For my old eyes, this is too crisp, too much contrast. I much prefer anti-aliased subpixel hinting. It's also more 'natural', that is, you need less distortion from the real glyph shapes and advance widths. Below 12ppem, essentially *all* fonts, whether they are serif or sans-serif, look exactly the same – there are simply not enough possibilities to position the pixels differently and still maintain legibility. You might simply use a single bitmap font instead. Werner
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
On Thursday, May 4, 2023 5:14:10 PM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > I'm curious if they have motivation to make bad fonts with no > > hinting? does it somehow help when/if anti-aliasing is turned on? > > > The relation between cost and benefit is no longer given: The > percentage of people who actually use a low-DPI screen together with > fonts rendered as monochrome is very near to zero. I think you're right, but I also think nothing beats a well hinted font @9 points on a full-HD laptop screen which are still plenty around? Martin
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
> "C" == Craig writes: C> I'm curious if they have motivation to make bad fonts with no C> hinting? does it somehow help when/if anti-aliasing is turned on? i presume that the motivation is that: werner's ttfautohint, which uses the same code as freetype, is the only floss option to add automated instructions to a sfnt. hiring someone to do manual instructing is expensive(!) and modern monitors tend to have enough pixel density that unhinted or autohinted grayscale looks fine. -JimC -- James Cloos OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
> I'm curious if they have motivation to make bad fonts with no > hinting? does it somehow help when/if anti-aliasing is turned on? The relation between cost and benefit is no longer given: The percentage of people who actually use a low-DPI screen together with fonts rendered as monochrome is very near to zero. Adding B/W hints to fonts is *extremely* expensive because only a very small group of experts is able to do it properly. Apple ships OSX without hinting support since more than ten years, IIRC. The resolution of hand-held devices is normally higher than 200dpi – at such high DPI values it is simply not possible at all to *see* the effects of B/W hinting. For special devices that use very low DPI values (say, a small LCD screen of a terminal at a supermarket counter) it is more straightforward to create a set of bitmap strokes for the smallest ppem values, doing 'normal' hinting for larger sizes. Werner
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
possibly, but the last few people that care about non-antialiased fonts are probably on this email list. I'm curious if they have motivation to make bad fonts with no hinting? does it somehow help when/if anti-aliasing is turned on? -craig On 5/4/23 06:20, Paul Menzel wrote: Dear Martin, dear Craig, Am 04.05.23 um 15:05 schrieb Craig: this was exactly my observation as well... remove fonts-liberation2. it's increasingly difficult with containerization/snaps, etc. r, -craig On 5/4/23 03:33, Martin van Es wrote: On Thursday, May 4, 2023 9:52:43 AM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: I think you misremember, for the reason mentioned above – just to be sure I've checked now that this variation font has no B/W hinting instructions. Its hinting was certainly equally bad with an older version of FreeType. Ok, I solved the problem. There were many coincidences playing a role in the original report. For starters the (real) regression in fonts-ubuntu triggered my attention, but unlucky testing against Liberation Sans revealed a change in hinting between fonts-liberation and fonts-liberation2, which wasn't installed on my reference system. fonts-liberation2 lacks proper hinting (which showed on my 23.04 system) but fonts-liberation is properly hinted (on the 22.04 machine). Once installed, fonts-liberation2 overrides all Liberation fonts, except for Liberation Sans Narrow. Removing fonts-liberation2 and downgrading fonts-ubuntu to fonts- ubuntu_0.83-6ubuntu1_all.deb seems to solve all the reported problems. My apologies for the noise and thanks for adding your thoughts to this! Are the Ubuntu folks aware of this problem? If not, please create an issue in their (or Debian’s?) bug tracker [1]. Kind regards, Paul [1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
Dear Martin, dear Craig, Am 04.05.23 um 15:05 schrieb Craig: this was exactly my observation as well... remove fonts-liberation2. it's increasingly difficult with containerization/snaps, etc. r, -craig On 5/4/23 03:33, Martin van Es wrote: On Thursday, May 4, 2023 9:52:43 AM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: I think you misremember, for the reason mentioned above – just to be sure I've checked now that this variation font has no B/W hinting instructions. Its hinting was certainly equally bad with an older version of FreeType. Ok, I solved the problem. There were many coincidences playing a role in the original report. For starters the (real) regression in fonts-ubuntu triggered my attention, but unlucky testing against Liberation Sans revealed a change in hinting between fonts-liberation and fonts-liberation2, which wasn't installed on my reference system. fonts-liberation2 lacks proper hinting (which showed on my 23.04 system) but fonts-liberation is properly hinted (on the 22.04 machine). Once installed, fonts-liberation2 overrides all Liberation fonts, except for Liberation Sans Narrow. Removing fonts-liberation2 and downgrading fonts-ubuntu to fonts- ubuntu_0.83-6ubuntu1_all.deb seems to solve all the reported problems. My apologies for the noise and thanks for adding your thoughts to this! Are the Ubuntu folks aware of this problem? If not, please create an issue in their (or Debian’s?) bug tracker [1]. Kind regards, Paul [1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
this was exactly my observation as well... remove fonts-liberation2. it's increasingly difficult with containerization/snaps, etc. r, -craig On 5/4/23 03:33, Martin van Es wrote: On Thursday, May 4, 2023 9:52:43 AM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: I think you misremember, for the reason mentioned above – just to be sure I've checked now that this variation font has no B/W hinting instructions. Its hinting was certainly equally bad with an older version of FreeType. Ok, I solved the problem. There were many coincidences playing a role in the original report. For starters the (real) regression in fonts-ubuntu triggered my attention, but unlucky testing against Liberation Sans revealed a change in hinting between fonts-liberation and fonts-liberation2, which wasn't installed on my reference system. fonts-liberation2 lacks proper hinting (which showed on my 23.04 system) but fonts-liberation is properly hinted (on the 22.04 machine). Once installed, fonts-liberation2 overrides all Liberation fonts, except for Liberation Sans Narrow. Removing fonts-liberation2 and downgrading fonts-ubuntu to fonts- ubuntu_0.83-6ubuntu1_all.deb seems to solve all the reported problems. My apologies for the noise and thanks for adding your thoughts to this! Martin
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
On Thursday, May 4, 2023 9:52:43 AM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: > I think you misremember, for the reason mentioned above – just to be > sure I've checked now that this variation font has no B/W hinting > instructions. Its hinting was certainly equally bad with an older > version of FreeType. Ok, I solved the problem. There were many coincidences playing a role in the original report. For starters the (real) regression in fonts-ubuntu triggered my attention, but unlucky testing against Liberation Sans revealed a change in hinting between fonts-liberation and fonts-liberation2, which wasn't installed on my reference system. fonts-liberation2 lacks proper hinting (which showed on my 23.04 system) but fonts-liberation is properly hinted (on the 22.04 machine). Once installed, fonts-liberation2 overrides all Liberation fonts, except for Liberation Sans Narrow. Removing fonts-liberation2 and downgrading fonts-ubuntu to fonts- ubuntu_0.83-6ubuntu1_all.deb seems to solve all the reported problems. My apologies for the noise and thanks for adding your thoughts to this! Martin
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
>> This is B/W monochrome rendering with full hinting. As can be >> seen, the result is just fine. I'm quite confident that the >> problem is *not* with FreeType. > > This is a regression from 22.10 to 23.04 and Ubuntu(-mono) has seen > some changes since 22.10, so let's compare the same font, because I > do suspect weird (libfreetype?) behaviour on Ubuntu 23.04 which I > can't explain. > > Attached is a screenshot of OpenSans-VariableFont_wdth,wght.ttf > using the same commandline. Well, all variation fonts I'm aware of have *zero* TrueType hints for B/W rendering! In case you are using Ubuntu VF (I've seen the demo on https://design.ubuntu.com/font but didn't find the place where to download it), I'm very confident that the same is true for this font. In other words, if you want good B/W rendering of the Ubuntu font, don't use the VF incarnation of it. > Attached is a screenshot of OpenSans-VariableFont_wdth,wght.ttf > using the same commandline. It clearly shows bad hinting and I'm > convinced this looked better hinted on 22.04 [...] I think you misremember, for the reason mentioned above – just to be sure I've checked now that this variation font has no B/W hinting instructions. Its hinting was certainly equally bad with an older version of FreeType. You might try to enforce auto-hinting in B/W mode, which should improve things slightly. However, be warned that the results are *far* from good in many cases; we actually don't support auto-hinting in B/W mode. Werner
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 3:45:21 PM CEST Werner LEMBERG wrote: > I've just tested a self-compiled version of current git, together with > the `ftview` demo program, using UbuntuMono-R.ttf (version 0.8, last > modified 2011-09-26). Attached is a screenshot of the following call > > ftview -kA5 -e unic 16 UbuntuMono-R.ttf > > This is B/W monochrome rendering with full hinting. As can be seen, > the result is just fine. I'm quite confident that the problem is > *not* with FreeType. This is a regression from 22.10 to 23.04 and Ubuntu(-mono) has seen some changes since 22.10, so let's compare the same font, because I do suspect weird (libfreetype?) behaviour on Ubuntu 23.04 which I can't explain. Attached is a screenshot of OpenSans-VariableFont_wdth,wght.ttf using the same commandline. It clearly shows bad hinting and I'm convinced this looked better hinted on 22.04, so I suspect it will look correct on your system too? https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans I also attach the hinted non-AA ftinspect view of the same font. ftview and ftinspect were compiled against freetype 2.13.0. As far as I can tell, I'm using libfreetype 2.13.0 to render fonts on my system (I don't know whether that's important for ftview and ftinspect?) Martin
Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04
> Ubuntu 23.04 has a regression in hinted font rendering and possibly > RGB subpixel rendering. I already tried replacing libfreetype with > the last known good version of 22.10 and compiled 2.13.0 to see if > that made any improvements but it didn't (as far as I can tell). I don't use Ubuntu, so I can't help. > I do understand that distro specific issues are not FreeType's > concern but both Ubuntu developers and other contributors to the > issue (including me) are failing to understand what's happing and > why e.g. MS's Verdana is rendered using perfect hinting? I've just tested a self-compiled version of current git, together with the `ftview` demo program, using UbuntuMono-R.ttf (version 0.8, last modified 2011-09-26). Attached is a screenshot of the following call ftview -kA5 -e unic 16 UbuntuMono-R.ttf This is B/W monochrome rendering with full hinting. As can be seen, the result is just fine. I'm quite confident that the problem is *not* with FreeType. In general, I recommend that you play around with the demo programs. If you prefer a nifty graphical interface you might try `ftinspect`, which was greatly enhanced in FreeType version 2.13.0. Werner
