infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

FND · 2013-05-07 06:14:04

After previously using the Ubuntu configuration, I've now (perforce) switched to infinality-bundle. I have also installed ttf-chromeos-fonts and switched to 20-aliases-default-free.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d.

Unfortunately, it all still looks pretty terrible: http://i.imgur.com/wuZBYRS.jpg

Despite having read the user notes and various threads here, I still don't understand enough about font configuration to make much sense of it. I assume there's a few steps I've been missing, but I have no idea where to read up on it - so any pointers would be much appreciated.

Last edited by FND (2013-05-07 06:14:35)

Grinch · 2013-05-07 06:38:23

nasedo wrote:

I'm also wondering, is it going to affect the rendering of TrueType fonts at all? It seems it's already a part of freetype 2.4.12 beta, but off by default:

I've looked into it a bit more and it only affects CFF format fonts (compact font format) which resides in .otf font files. Unlike TrueType where the font creator has to manually give 'hints' of how part of the glyphs should be rendered (and often different hints for different sizes iirc), in CFF much more of this work is left to the rasterizer, making it easier for the font designers while (apparently) yielding better quality results.

Also there is a CFF rasterizer in freetype already, however the new rasterizer from Adobe/Google is supposed to be vastly superior. Obviously a statement from the makers of this new rasterizer means little compared to actually seeing the results on your own screen so until the new CFF rasterizer makes it into freetype proper I will reserve judgement. Also since it doesn't support truetype fonts there are quite alot of 'truetype only' fonts out there which won't gain anything from this. For my meagre needs though, which are mainly the Droid fonts, and Adobe's 'Source Code Pro' they are available in CFF (.otf) format AFAIK.

Anyway, this is kind of off-topic so lets not derail this very informative thread (my bad), once the new CFF is officially part of freetype there will likely be a separate discussion.

brebs · 2013-05-07 07:19:46

FND wrote:

pretty terrible

How? Looks fine to me.

Don't use jpeg compression for examples, that adds artifacts to the picture - PNG is good instead.

FND · 2013-05-07 07:34:02

brebs wrote:

Looks fine to me.
Don't use jpeg compression for examples, that adds artifacts to the picture - PNG is good instead.

Sorry, I hadn't considered that: http://i.imgur.com/pMMeD9H.png

It actually looks less bad in that screenshot than it does "live" - either way (and I really hate to say this) fonts were much easier on the eyes with the Ubuntu configuration before.

hokasch · 2013-05-07 11:37:50

For the cairo-infinality-ultimate package, can you add the cairo version to the provides array?

provides=("cairo=$pkgver" 'cairo-xcb' 'cairo-infinality-ultimate' 'cairo-ubuntu')

This will make updating work with packages that require a specific version of cairo, e.g. libgdiplus (requires cairo>=1.8.10).

For the other packages in there, I think you can safely remove them. 'cairo-infinality-ultimate' is the name of the package itself, and the other two cairos should be enough to have in conflicts (or are there really packages out there depending on cairo-ubuntu/cairo-xcb which you want to keep working with cairo-infinality-ultimate?).

bohoomil · 2013-05-07 13:14:26

FND wrote:

…terrible…
…less bad…
…much easier on the eyes with the Ubuntu configuration…

Conclusions:

1.

$ultimate -ne $Ubuntu

2. You should switch back to the Ubuntu style which is what you really like (and want).

Edit:

Please, do not report non-issues here. You mentioned having read the 'user notes', but you seem to have missed the part discussing reporting bugs.

If you don't like beer you don't walk into a pub and start a talk about how awfully beer sucks while tea is obviously a superior beverage, do you? With a minimum of common sense in your pocket, as well as healthy life instinct you wouldn't do that because you know since the early days of your existence that nobody gives a damn. And, of course, that local beer experts can start playing football with you immediately after you have finished (or rather with your head, to be precise)… Of course, you can write a comprehensive review proving that using the ultimate bundle can result in serious eye damage as well as infertility, but you have the entire Internet to express yourself except for this place which is supposed to be a support thread. However, the uniqueness of one's perception, aesthetic sense or preferences in drinks don't and won't qualify for it.

I hope I have made it clear, for future reference…

Last edited by bohoomil (2013-05-07 14:46:50)

bohoomil · 2013-05-07 15:03:48

@hokasch: good point. I will create updated packages providing 'cairo=$pkgver'.

I know that 'provides' / 'conflicts' arrays may look odd… My intention was to preserve compatibility of the 'ultimate' package with applications that may require certain features in cairo while not explicitely rejecting others at the same time. It shouldn't hurt and may be found handy when switching between back and forth between various cairo branches, or when bulding packages that require any specific one. That's why unless it backfires, I would suggest the we leave it as it is, OK?

hokasch · 2013-05-07 16:35:05

bohoomil wrote:

That's why unless it backfires, I would suggest the we leave it as it is, OK?

Sure, I don't see it breaking anything and its your package anyway.. The only objectively redundant entry is "cairo-infinality-ultimate", as this is the name of the package itself.
Thanks for providing this! I never could be bothered with font config myself, and the improvement is pretty ~~bold~~ impressive.

bohoomil · 2013-05-07 16:43:12

Yes, "cairo-infinality-ultimate" is, well, a 'little' nonsense there. I will remove it in the next upgrade, too.

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

FND · 2013-05-07 17:12:07

bohoomil wrote:

Please, do not report non-issues here.

My apologies, bohoomil - I certainly did not mean to offend or even troll anyone.

Perhaps it's just the (previously admitted) lack of holistic understanding, but I remain convinced that the problem is not with the infinality font rendering per se, but with my use (configuration) thereof. I suspect that I simply failed to select the right font(s), so I will keep experimenting with that and continue to read up on the subject.

Ledti · 2013-05-07 18:15:02

FND wrote:

bohoomil wrote:
Please, do not report non-issues here.
My apologies, bohoomil - I certainly did not mean to offend or even troll anyone.
Perhaps it's just the (previously admitted) lack of holistic understanding, but I remain convinced that the problem is not with the infinality font rendering per se, but with my use (configuration) thereof. I suspect that I simply failed to select the right font(s), so I will keep experimenting with that and continue to read up on the subject.

You could try changing the default fonts in firefox rather than changing the global defaults.

20-aliases-default-free.conf defaults to Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine which I believe are based on the Liberation font family (ttf-liberation).

Some good alternatives are:

serif: Noto Serif, PT Serif, Droid Serif
sans-serif: Droid Sans, PT Sans, Noto Sans

Also, you might want to take a look at ttf-google-fonts-git in the AUR, it includes most of the recommended free fonts and LOTS (it's a big package) of others that you can experiment with.

bohoomil · 2013-05-07 19:27:17

What Ledti points out is actually a good practice in general: default faces are simple shortcuts for applications so that they do not need to rely on random fontconfig decisions. However, default fonts are just like anything default in this world (including pants: en || gb): some will like them, some will eventually get used to them, while a growing group of others will walk down the street demanding more freedom. Honestly, there is plenty of freedom as far as font families are concerned: in the next minor release of fontconfig, there will be (a) separate file(s) in which custom changes can be introduced on a global basis. The installation / upgrade procedure will be modified accordingly so that updates to core conf.avail.infinality will not override custom settings once they are detected, and will be installed as *.pacnew files instead of overwriting the ones being currently in use. The only difference between such a solution and a GUI based dialogue is that in the former case you will need to type font names instead of pointing and clicking them on a list. Re-linking /etc/fonts/conf.d/20-aliases-default.conf to the new custom file will activate the changes.

I am currently writing a sort of a '(very) newbie freetype2 / fontconfig guide' which is supposed to clarify, step by step, the basics of font configuration, especially the role of files found in /etc/fonts/conf.avail{.infinality}. This should provide an insight into a couple of recurring doubts and questions, including the logic behind selection of default font families. Of course, all the available more comprehensive resources, including our Wiki, will remain indispensable for everyone wishing to dig deeper into the problem.

Last edited by bohoomil (2013-05-07 19:28:19)

brebs · 2013-05-07 21:13:38

FND, you are being annoyingly vague.

If you want the fonts to be bolder/darker, then try changing INFINALITY_FT_FILTER_PARAMS.

wilfriedd · 2013-05-08 15:06:05

I just installed the infinality-bundle, and I must say I'm very impressed by the results. The way my fonts are rendered is greatly improved, thanks for the effort to make these packages available in such an easy way! However, when diving into the configuration I did have some questions/remarks.

First of all, I have an issue with the default fallback font. The conf file conf.d/49-sansserif.conf makes every unknown font remap to the sans-serif family. Unfortunately config files are parsed from low nr to high, so my 20-aliases-default with Arial as default font for sans-serif is not reparsed. This means some other font which aliases the sans-serif family (in my case this happens in 57-dejavu-sans.conf) is substituted. So the default fallback font is not my default sans-serif font (Arial) but DejaVu Sans. I guess I can fix this by moving my aliases after the 49-sansserrif.conf file?

Secondly, I see at the end of /etc/fonts/fonts.conf the conf.avail.infinality directory is included. This means that after the parsing of /etc/fonts/conf.d also EVERY conf file in the avail.infinality is also parsed. I thought we were supposed to selectively symlink conf files from the conf.avail.infinality and conf.avail directories, or am I mistaken?

keepitsimpleengineer · 2013-05-08 16:10:44

I installed the infinality-bundle (congratulations for a big and needed accomplishment)

However, now this is happening…

[--ljohnson{08:00:29}~]$ acroread
/opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/bin/acroread: error while loading shared libraries: libcairo.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is on a new install on x86_64 of acroread 9.5.4-2 from AUR.

Thinking was I that cairo-infinality-ultimate would provide this?

keepitsimpleengineer · 2013-05-08 16:26:50

bohoomil wrote:

I am currently writing a sort of a '(very) newbie freetype2 / fontconfig guide' which is supposed to clarify, step by step, the basics of font configuration, especially the role of files found in /etc/fonts/conf.avail{.infinality}. This should provide an insight into a couple of recurring doubts and questions, including the logic behind selection of default font families. Of course, all the available more comprehensive resources, including our Wiki, will remain indispensable for everyone wishing to dig deeper into the problem.

Very cool.

bohoomil · 2013-05-08 16:49:45

@wilfriedd: thank you very much for your feedback. What you have pointed out is going to be fixed / modified in one of the upgrades to come (as stated here and here). At the moment the recommended way to change default font faces is to copy and rename one of the /etc/conf.avail.infinality/20-aliases-default-*.conf files, change its content accordingly and re-link /etc/conf.d/20-aliases-default.conf to it. The other thing is a shameful leftover of my experiments which I constantly forget to comment out. It will disappear from fonts.conf for good -- feel free to remove it from your copy at any time.

bohoomil · 2013-05-08 16:58:24

keepitsimpleengineer wrote:

[--ljohnson{08:00:29}~]$ acroread
/opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/bin/acroread: error while loading shared libraries: libcairo.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To run Acrobat Reader for Linux x86_64, you will need the [multilib] repository, as well as [infinality-bundle-multilib]. Take a look at the PKGBUILD dependencies section:

if [[ "$CARCH" == 'i686' ]]; then
  depends+=('gtk2' 'mesa' 'freetype2')
  optdepends=('libcanberra: XDG sound support')
else
  depends+=('lib32'-{'gtk2','mesa','libxml2','xcb-util','freetype2'})
  optdepends=('lib32-libcanberra: XDG sound support')
fi

This should resolve the issue and Acrobat should work (as long as the libraries used in Arch are compatible with it).

keepitsimpleengineer · 2013-05-08 18:46:43

bohoomil wrote:

To run Acrobat Reader for Linux x86_64, you will need the [multilib] repository, as well as [infinality-bundle-multilib].

I thought I have every thing in terms of repositories…

[--ljohnson{11:12:05}~]$ sudo pacman -Syy
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core                            104.7 KiB   845K/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%
 extra                          1510.1 KiB  3.45M/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%
 community                      1942.1 KiB  4.21M/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%
 multilib                        106.3 KiB   958K/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%
 infinality-bundle              1388.0   B  0.00B/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%
 infinality-bundle-multilib     1260.0   B  0.00B/s 00:00 [###############################] 100%

and here is the makepkg output…

[--ljohnson{11:20:46}acroread]$ makepkg -sf
==> Making package: acroread 9.5.4-2 (Wed May  8 11:20:51 PDT 2013)
==> WARNING: Using a PKGBUILD without a package() function is deprecated.
==> Checking runtime dependencies...
==> Checking buildtime dependencies...
==> Retrieving sources...
  -> Found AdbeRdr9.5.4-1_i486linux_enu.tar.bz2
==> Validating source files with md5sums...
    AdbeRdr9.5.4-1_i486linux_enu.tar.bz2 ... Passed
==> Extracting sources...
  -> Extracting AdbeRdr9.5.4-1_i486linux_enu.tar.bz2 with bsdtar
==> Removing existing pkg/ directory...
==> Entering fakeroot environment...
==> Starting build()...
  -> Installing Main Files...
  -> Installing Bin Files...
  -> Installing Broswer Plugin...
  -> Installing Icon Resource...
  -> Installing License...
==> Tidying install...
  -> Purging unwanted files...
  -> Compressing man and info pages...
==> Creating package "acroread"...
  -> Generating .PKGINFO file...
  -> Adding install file...
  -> Generating .MTREE file...
  -> Compressing package...
==> Leaving fakeroot environment.
==> Finished making: acroread 9.5.4-2 (Wed May  8 11:22:24 PDT 2013)

From my x86_64 system

[root@kise-005 lib]# ls | grep 'libcairo.so.2.11200.14'
libcairo.so.2.11200.14
[root@kise-005 lib]# pwd
/usr/lib

and from cairo 1.12.14-4 in [extra] repository Contents Files: "usr/lib/libcairo.so.2.11200.14"

Should I refer this to the /AUR maintainer..?

Should I try this on my i686 system..?

Is there anything I can do to help..?

⋯thanks!

hokasch · 2013-05-08 18:54:58

Do you have lib32-cairo-infinality-ultimate installed?

keepitsimpleengineer · 2013-05-08 19:14:50

hokasch wrote:

Do you have lib32-cairo-infinality-ultimate installed?

From my pacman.log…

[2013-05-07 13:44] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -S artwiz-fonts <snip> freetype2-infinality-ultimate lib32-cairo-infinality-ultimate lib32-fontconfig-infinality-ultimate lib32-freetype2-infinality-ultimate'

where <snip> is some font packages.

keepitsimpleengineer · 2013-05-08 19:41:04

[SOLVED]

hokasch wrote:

Do you have lib32-cairo-infinality-ultimate installed?

Yikes!

Even though I (thought I) installed it yesterday, I decided to re-install. Discovered it was not installed, and after installation, arcoread now works.

Thanks

Last edited by keepitsimpleengineer (2013-05-08 19:42:00)

bohoomil · 2013-05-09 17:43:12

Good news, I guess…

I've started testing the final version of fontconfig-infinality-ultimate which
should ultimately (what a pun ) remove any remaining bits of the generic
fontconfig-infinality and its nesting of settings within the stock fontconfig's tree.
This means that I have entirely reworked all the fontconfig config files
(~14400 lines of XML code) as well as the main fonts.conf. Here are the most
substantial changes (and a few things that has become evident so far):

The overall experience is dramatically better at times: fonts look even
cleaner, sharper and less blurry (without becoming thinner), providing more
uniform look of the text.
The current configuration should be more DE friendly: fontconfig settings are
appended to DE ones, not assigned like before (I'm currently testing it in Xfce
and it seems to be working great).
20-aliases-default.conf file was replaced by 60-latin.conf with a
hierarchical collection of multiple default serif, sans-serif, monospace and
other faces. This particular file will be duplicated so that everyone can set
their own hierarchy of preferred faces.
72dpi entry was removed from /etc/fonts/fonts.conf which should solve issues
with too small fonts.
The 'out-of-the-box' principle should be closer to the inteded model.

The stock /etc/fonts/conf.avail directory has been left as it is for reference
purposes.

If anyone is willing to join me in testing (this shouldn't be a painful experience): I am
going to create packages for both i686 and x86_64 and leave them in the Dropbox
folder. Before installation, create a backup of the entire /etc/fonts so that
you can quickly revert to the fully working setup (just in case). Once we are
sure there are really no major issues, the upgrade will be made available in the
repository for everyone.

WonderWoofy · 2013-05-10 01:10:22

I just went to go check for these, and they are not (yet?) there.

bohoomil · 2013-05-10 01:50:51

Packages will arrive soon, I hope, but you can already grab the key part: the settings. Simply replace your current /etc/fonts with the content of the archive, restart the X and have fun. Of course, just as I wrote, create a backup of /etc/fonts in case I haven't thought about something crucial (chances are few, but always makes sense to be safe)… Hope you like it.

Thanks.

Arch Linux

#126 2013-05-07 06:14:04

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#127 2013-05-07 06:38:23

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#128 2013-05-07 07:19:46

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#129 2013-05-07 07:34:02

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#130 2013-05-07 11:37:50

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#131 2013-05-07 13:14:26

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#132 2013-05-07 15:03:48

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#133 2013-05-07 16:35:05

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#134 2013-05-07 16:43:12

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#135 2013-05-07 17:12:07

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#136 2013-05-07 18:15:02

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#137 2013-05-07 19:27:17

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#138 2013-05-07 21:13:38

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#139 2013-05-08 15:06:05

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#140 2013-05-08 16:10:44

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#141 2013-05-08 16:26:50

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#142 2013-05-08 16:49:45

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#143 2013-05-08 16:58:24

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#144 2013-05-08 18:46:43

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#145 2013-05-08 18:54:58

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#146 2013-05-08 19:14:50

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#147 2013-05-08 19:41:04

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#148 2013-05-09 17:43:12

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#149 2013-05-10 01:10:22

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

#150 2013-05-10 01:50:51

Re: infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier

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