freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

unixguru · 2006-05-21 08:34:42

I think judd forgot to enable TTF byte code interperter in the new package which IMHO is vastly superior to freetype2's hinting. The BCI has some patent issues so maybe they disabled it. Maybe someone can compile freetype2 with BCI support.

Creepy · 2006-05-21 09:02:33

Same problems here. Fonts are way more fuzzier (anti-aliased). I already had bitmapped fonts disabled so I don't think that is the problem.

Even worse: the font rendering is buggy now: see http://www.bosselaar.net/fb.png . In the bottom right corner there should be fonts.. this happend when I enabled the option to disable antialiasing for fonts <= 12

jw · 2006-05-21 09:36:16

does anyone know how to set hinting to full for openoffice??? fonts look absolutely horrid: www.ilorentz.org/~janwillem/ooo_fuzzy.png

Creepy · 2006-05-21 09:53:32

The bug in font rendering is caused bu the NVidia driver when RenderAccel is on. Disable RenderAccell and the fonts are readable

jani · 2006-05-21 10:01:10

Creepy, that may be part of the problem, but my KDE fonts are bad on an Intel graphics adapter (laptop) while my firefox fonts are sweet.

Loke · 2006-05-21 10:41:27

http://l2p.dk/misc/before.jpg
http://l2p.dk/misc/after.jpg

Not fuzzy here, but it looks ugly.
Also fonts in firefox etc. looks different.

iphitus · 2006-05-21 10:58:55

Um, just a tip, if you link a screenshot of fonts, use a lossless format like png. Both of your jpg's look crappy Loke because of the compression.

James

Creepy · 2006-05-21 11:42:04

jani wrote:

Creepy, that may be part of the problem, but my KDE fonts are bad on an Intel graphics adapter (laptop) while my firefox fonts are sweet.

I was talking about the fonts that where completely unreadable (see the screenshot I posted or see http://www.bosselaar.net/browser.png ). Thats because of the NVidia driver.

The thicker fonts (or fuzzy fonts) doesn't have anything todo with that. To fix this in Gnome I used the fonts configuration and used full hinting instead of medium hinting what seems to be the default now. You can probably enable full hinting with the configuration of fontconfig which should "fix" the "problems" (which is a personal preference instead of a problem I think ).

jani · 2006-05-21 11:55:25

Creepy, check this out: http://tinyurl.com/jxw5e The text on the left is with the old version of fontconfig and freetype2, the text on the right is with the current version. There is quite a big difference, and the only thing I did was used pacman to downgrade to the old ones and restarted X. As for changing the level of hinting, KDE control centre does have hinting levels, and changing them makes no difference. The frustrating thing is that Firefox fonts are still nice crisp and clear, just like the fonts on the left are. I might put in a bug report on this, cos something is broken.

edit: it's almost as if the text is being anti-aliased twice... dunno though.

I see what you mean about your screenshot (the link wasn't working earlier).

JGC · 2006-05-21 11:59:21

unixguru wrote:

I think judd forgot to enable TTF byte code interperter in the new package which IMHO is vastly superior to freetype2's hinting. The BCI has some patent issues so maybe they disabled it. Maybe someone can compile freetype2 with BCI support.

Freetype2 has been patched for BCI, but it looks like either it isn't enabled, or something special is required with 2.2.x now.

I updated fontconfig to the latest 2.3.9x development release on my system, I don't see any drawbacks, only some small improvements. I think the default upstream font configuration has been changed a bit in 2.3.9x. The only point with it is that it's unstable development software that I don't trust completely.

I will put up some fontconfig 2.3.95 packages today with patches from Fedora. These will need good testing before they would hit current, as I don't want to break all desktops with it right before the 0.7.2 release.

lanrat · 2006-05-21 12:34:01

Right after the upgrade I've been surprised that you can see so much differrence. At a closer look the fonts do seem to be a bit sharper but also kerning is better IMO (the "oo" in "Bookmark" menu in Opera always looked too compressed and now it's ok). So, I'm quite happy with the current look. 95% of applications (both gtk and qt), menus, webpages etc. look better to me. Only some fonts in some sizes look not very good but still readable. Adobe reader shows fonts too blurry but it always was. Also in the openoffice the fonts look very bad. From their font FAQ:

Antialiasing is not used when OpenOffice.org detects the X Rendering extension (Render) together with a Xinerama extension.

I am using xinerama usually but changing to noxinerama mode doesn't change anything in openoffice so I don't know what is going on - perhaps oo should be just recompiled with the new fontconfig or something.

I'm using i915 laptop with LCD + external LCD in Xinerama mode. I have correct DPI ( 98 ) set in /etc/fonts/local.conf for my primary notebook LCD (for the external LCD it should be 96 IIRC but you can't have two setups) and in Xinerama mode xdpyinfo shows

  dimensions:    2720x900 pixels (705x232 millimeters)
  resolution:    98x99 dots per inch

but it's acceptable. I'm currently using KDE with full hinting and subpixel but fonts in gtk applications look the same to me.

I always used autohinter with my tweaked local.conf so that may be the reason why there is not much difference to me. Hinting levels should work in KDE and if they don't then maybe hinter is disabled and only autohinter is available.

tth · 2006-05-21 12:46:59

Using gnome-font-properties (smoothing=grayscale, hinting=full) I managed to get the fonts look good again, but how to do this without gnome? I don't want to run gnome-settings-daemon because it's against my religion.

Gullible Jones · 2006-05-21 12:50:29

I am not using Xinerama, and I still get bad fonts in OOo - both fuzzy AA ones and ones that are aliased to hell and back.

As for the crappy fonts in other apps... Yeah, I can reproduce that stuff too by tuning down the hinting. Use full hinting and it will go away.

tth · 2006-05-21 13:00:22

Tested with gnome-settings-daemon. It didn't work. I still need to run gnome-font-properties and restart apps (at least opera) to get clear fonts.

Runzajs · 2006-05-21 13:32:36

the fonts looks now much better, good work !

rezza · 2006-05-21 14:06:43

tth wrote:

Using gnome-font-properties (smoothing=grayscale, hinting=full) I managed to get the fonts look good again, but how to do this without gnome? I don't want to run gnome-settings-daemon because it's against my religion.

Use a ~/.fonts.conf file.

JGC · 2006-05-21 16:21:47

I uploaded a fontconfig 2.3.95-1 package which contains the latest fontconfig together with some config tunings from fedora. Please try this version and report any problems or improvements with it:

http://www.archlinux.org/~jgc/fontconfi … pkg.tar.gz

JGC · 2006-05-21 16:38:26

I uploaded a new version (same URL) without the redhat config patch, as I don't like the default fonts they use at all (sans looks crappy, monospace is almost unreadable)

stavrosg · 2006-05-21 17:27:32

This package really improved the situation, thanks!

lumiwa · 2006-05-21 18:18:24

JGC wrote:

I uploaded a fontconfig 2.3.95-1 package which contains the latest fontconfig together with some config tunings from fedora. Please try this version and report any problems or improvements with it:
http://www.archlinux.org/~jgc/fontconfi … pkg.tar.gz

Thanks a lot . It is much better now...

UnrealX · 2006-05-21 18:50:59

Yesterday, after full system upgrade my fonts went all ugly, so I have tried reinstalling various font packages:

[05/20/06 15:13] starting full system upgrade
[05/20/06 15:48] upgraded fontconfig (2.3.2-5 -> 2.3.2-6)
[05/20/06 15:49] upgraded freetype2 (2.1.10-3 -> 2.2.1-1)
[05/20/06 15:49] upgraded kernel26beyond (2.6.16.beyond3-1 -> 2.6.16.beyond4-1)
[05/20/06 15:50] upgraded kmobiletools (0.4.3.2-1 -> 0.4.3.3-1)
[05/20/06 15:50] upgraded libsndfile (1.0.15-1 -> 1.0.16-1)
[05/20/06 15:50] upgraded sdl (1.2.9-2 -> 1.2.10-1)
[05/20/06 18:04] synchronizing package lists
[05/20/06 18:05] starting full system upgrade
[05/20/06 18:09] upgraded ttf-ms-fonts (1.3-8 -> 1.3-8)
[05/20/06 18:09] installed ttf-cheapskate (2.0-4)
[05/20/06 18:09] installed artwiz-fonts (1.3-3)
[05/21/06 15:23] synchronizing package lists
[05/21/06 15:24] starting full system upgrade
[05/21/06 19:04] upgraded ttf-bitstream-vera (1.10-3 -> 1.10-3)
[05/21/06 19:40] upgraded xorg-fonts-100dpi (1.0.0-2 -> 1.0.0-2)
[05/21/06 19:53] upgraded freetype2 (2.2.1-1 -> 2.1.10-3)
[05/21/06 19:57] synchronizing package lists
[05/21/06 19:57] starting full system upgrade
[05/21/06 19:59] upgraded freetype2 (2.1.10-3 -> 2.2.1-1)
[05/21/06 19:59] upgraded kchmviewer (1.3-1 -> 2.5-2)
[05/21/06 19:59] upgraded sdl_mixer (1.2.6-4 -> 1.2.7-2)
[05/21/06 19:59] upgraded vte (0.12.0-1 -> 0.12.1-1)
[05/21/06 21:33] synchronizing package lists
[05/21/06 21:33] starting full system upgrade
[05/21/06 21:33] upgraded fontconfig (2.3.2-6 -> 2.3.95-1)

I have upgraded fontconfig to 2.3.95-1, however fonts are all edgy:
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/60/snapshot725bl.png (zoom in a little)
Downgrading freetype2 didn`t help either.

Creepy · 2006-05-21 19:49:56

UnrealX wrote:

Yesterday, after full system upgrade my fonts went all ugly, so I have tried reinstalling various font packages:
........
I have upgraded fontconfig to 2.3.95-1, however fonts are all edgy:
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/60/snapshot725bl.png (zoom in a little)
Downgrading freetype2 didn`t help either.

Font antialiasing seems to be turned off. If you turn this on things should improve.

russianpirate · 2006-05-21 19:57:51

i dont really need to use the new package (the one provided by JGC).. does anyone else thinks the regular one is fine?

UnrealX · 2006-05-21 20:09:23

Creepy wrote:

UnrealX wrote:
Yesterday, after full system upgrade my fonts went all ugly, so I have tried reinstalling various font packages:
........
I have upgraded fontconfig to 2.3.95-1, however fonts are all edgy:
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/60/snapshot725bl.png (zoom in a little)
Downgrading freetype2 didn`t help either.
Font antialiasing seems to be turned off. If you turn this on things should improve.

I have tried turning it on, playing with hinting style, however it didn`t help too much.
I`m using laptop, xdpyinfo provides additional information:

dimensions: 1280x1024 pixels (332x211 millimeters)
resolution: 98x123 dots per inch

Gullible Jones · 2006-05-21 20:39:16

JGC wrote:

I uploaded a fontconfig 2.3.95-1 package which contains the latest fontconfig together with some config tunings from fedora. Please try this version and report any problems or improvements with it:
http://www.archlinux.org/~jgc/fontconfi … pkg.tar.gz

Full antialiasing looks exactly the same. Light and medium AA look even fuzzier, if there's any difference. Bytecode antialiasing is simply not used, period.

(So far, the only way I know of to get bytecode AA is to use E17 - its session manager seems to be the only one that doesn't prohibit the use of bytecode antialiasing, and I couldn't find a way to do it with text files. )

Arch Linux

#26 2006-05-21 08:34:42

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#27 2006-05-21 09:02:33

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#28 2006-05-21 09:36:16

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#29 2006-05-21 09:53:32

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#30 2006-05-21 10:01:10

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#31 2006-05-21 10:41:27

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#32 2006-05-21 10:58:55

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#33 2006-05-21 11:42:04

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#34 2006-05-21 11:55:25

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#35 2006-05-21 11:59:21

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#36 2006-05-21 12:34:01

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#37 2006-05-21 12:46:59

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#38 2006-05-21 12:50:29

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#39 2006-05-21 13:00:22

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#40 2006-05-21 13:32:36

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#41 2006-05-21 14:06:43

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#42 2006-05-21 16:21:47

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#43 2006-05-21 16:38:26

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#44 2006-05-21 17:27:32

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#45 2006-05-21 18:18:24

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#46 2006-05-21 18:50:59

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#47 2006-05-21 19:49:56

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#48 2006-05-21 19:57:51

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#49 2006-05-21 20:09:23

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#50 2006-05-21 20:39:16

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

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