So… my reading of the upstream mailing list threads is that this is not going to get fixed anytime soon.
Dave Arnold, the author of Adobe’s CFF FreeType patch, blames incorrect gamma while rendering (i.e. NOT X’s gamma), implying the “bug” is really in cairo or Qt/GTK/whatever somewhere. The aforementioned fontconfig configuration did not work for me, and would not work for others anyway unless their cairo is patched[1] to respect fontconfig configuration, For those who want their fonts to look better /now/, I’ve attached a patch that will disable the new Adobe CFF engine (it remains available via FreeType’s API, but will not be used by default). For me, it completely restores FreeType 2.4’s rendering. I’m not going to try to give a Debian packaging primer here, but to rebuild FreeType with this patch, you can run something similar to the following commands: # sudo apt-get build-dep libfreetype6 # apt-get source libfreetype6 # cd freetype* # cd debian/patches-freetype/ Move the attached patch file into this directory. # echo enable_old_cff.patch >> series # cd ../../ # dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b Wait a while for the package to build. Once done: # cd ../ # sudo dpkg --install libfreetype6_*deb As soon as you start new programs, you should see an immediate change, but reboot just to be in case. You should put the package on hold to prevent it from being upgraded the next time you upgrade packages. [1]: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11838 -- Samat K Jain <http://samat.org/> • GPG: 0x4A456FBA
diff -uNr freetype-2.5.2.orig/include/config/ftoption.h freetype-2.5.2/include/config/ftoption.h --- freetype-2.5.2.orig/include/config/ftoption.h 2013-12-08 11:40:19.511032012 -0700 +++ freetype-2.5.2/include/config/ftoption.h 2014-04-16 02:37:21.738068874 -0600 @@ -765,7 +765,7 @@ /* switch between the two engines using the `hinting-engine' property of */ /* the cff driver module. */ /* */ -/* #define CFF_CONFIG_OPTION_OLD_ENGINE */ + #define CFF_CONFIG_OPTION_OLD_ENGINE /*************************************************************************/
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
