freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

slackhack · 2006-06-20 14:50:39

JGC wrote:

These things are caused by Freetype2. Debian has the problem too, Gentoo has it buggy also since a day or so and other distributions will follow.
I'll try to make some time to revert to 2.1.10 and apply some security patches from "open"SuSE (they're not really open, you have to look for SRPMs and their bugzilla has the security bugreports locked out, even Sun is more open than this)

personally, i don't really care if my freetype is always "cutting edge" when it's just for the sake of it being "cutting edge." given recent experience with freetype, it often seems like it could be held back a little until the bugs are worked out more, since the freetype people apparently have a thing about releasing buggy software all the time.

JGC · 2006-06-20 15:02:51

The point here was that freetype 2.2.1 fixed quite some security bugs. As I use a nice dualhead setup with 2 TFT panels with subpixel hinting and full hinting enabled, I didn't see a difference. I like the authinter as it is with these settings, I dislike the bytecode hinter, with 2.1.x and also with 2.2.x.

slackhack · 2006-06-20 15:34:51

like i said, when it's just for the sake of being "cutting edge." security updates are a different thing entirely, of course.

i'm noticing a huge difference using the autohinter and full hinting, but some of that is coming from gnome "bleeding over" into XFCE4 somehow, ever since i started it a few days ago. even the size of the icons on the xfce panel are smaller now. not sure what in gnome is causing that, all the DPI settings are the same. i might even reinstall arch without gnome to see if that fixes some of these problems. it's getting really annoying.

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-20 18:58:06

iphitus wrote:

I dont think i've ever seen bitmap fonts selectable in GTK2, in my years using linux.
James

They are... If you use Artwiz fonts with GTK2 stuff you are using bitmap fonts. To enable them you just link /etc/fonts/conf.d/yes-bitmaps.conf to /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-bitmaps.conf, after removing the old 10-bitmaps.conf which links to no-bitmaps.conf... That's supposed to work anyway, and does if you use KDE or XFCE or anything else, but unfortunately does not work until you reinstall fontconfig if you have Gnome installed.

slackhack wrote:

what's an example of a bitmap font, as opposed to a non-bitmap font?

Bitmaps fonts are bitmaps as opposed to SVG - for example, artwiz-fonts, Terminus, and the Xorg 75dpi and 100dpi fonts. At the right sizes they don't need antialiasing but they can look absolutely when scaled up.

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-20 22:45:16

Ouchee. "Too many regressions" about sums it up doesn't it?

SuiRIS · 2006-06-21 18:18:22

Today, freetype has been updated and the fonts in OpenOffice looking quite good like the fonts in the other gtk-apps
Thanks!

slackhack · 2006-06-22 13:14:08

they look better for me, too, thanks JGC. i had to delete all the entries in the ~/.gconf directory, though, to get them to revert, even though i'm using xfce4. kind of strange that either xfce4 would be so linked to gnome like that, or that gnome config files would exert so much influence over X, even when it's not running, but whatevah - as long as things look okay, i'm happy.

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-22 13:50:38

Just FWIW... Are you using Testing?

trofer · 2006-10-16 05:40:23

Loke wrote:

Also fonts in firefox etc. looks different.

Font aliasing looks just as before for me, I don't see the difference, but some websites (wikipedia, slashdot) fonts are completely different in Firefox, sans-serif got wider. I'm sure it isn't a Firefox issue, since the only change that triggered it was getting the last freetype build. Using Xfce-svn from Shadowhand's repos.

Edit: I noted the fuzzy anti-aliasing in Opera, which uses qt.

Edit2: Firefox thing fixed when enabling bitmapped fonts. :oops: Is there a truetype version of these same fonts?

shadowhand · 2006-10-16 07:08:14

I haven't read this whole thread, but I was one of the first people to see the new fontconfig, and here's my limited results (both LCD screens, one with nvidia driver, one with radeon driver):

( setting :: result )
no autohinter :: better fonts
full hinter :: better fonts
rgb sub-hinter :: better fonts

I also enabled bitmap fonts, and my screen DPI is set to 96dpi (via GTK, default setting). I set my hinting to full with this ~/.fonts.conf file:

<match>
 <edit>
   <const>hintfull</const>
 </edit>
</match>

One thing that I did notice is that enabling full hinting and the autohinter causes absolutely horrible font rendering for non-standard styles (bold, italic, etc), and causes weird spacing with just about every TTF font. For me, the only way to get decent fonts was using full hinter with no autohinter, every other option just looked like crap.

lanrat · 2006-10-16 15:07:03

I'm using autohinter only (except for bold fonts) and it looks just like before the update. I don't really like the new multi file config so I moved all my custom settings to local.conf (autohinter, dpi, bitmap fonts, some font mappings etc.) and left only a few other standard links (aliases and fixes that might be useful for me). I also disabled reading settings from fonts.conf file in user's home directory (I think that's where KDE writes it's settings and it uses hinter not autohinter). Now I have all important configuration in local.conf and it's system-wide (in theory at least :-)).

I always believed that hintstyle does not have any visible effect on autohinter. I thought it works for BCI hinter only :-)
However gentoo wiki says something else now and I can't find an ultimate answer for that:

Both KDE and GNOME have nice GUIs in which the user can select between 'light,' 'medium,' and 'strong' hinting. This appears to refer to the FreeType 'auto hinter', and not the BCI. If you use the BCI, the only settings that seem to make any difference is to have hinting 'off' entirely (which looks ugly). In other words 'light,' 'medium,' and 'strong' hinting appear to all look identical when the BCI is used instead of the auto hinter.

This is different from my experience and I'll stick to my config for the moment unless some font guru ultimately answers that problem.

At the moment I'm not using hintstyle at all and fonts look as close as possibe to ClearType from win xp (a little thinner IMO but readable).

Wikipiedia main page is a very good test (many encodings, many fonts used) but I had a lot of problems with it when I had too many fonts installed including xorg crashes and system reboots (a few months ago).
IMHO first thing to do is to eliminate fonts that are not used or are poor quality fonts.

I'm using xinerama mode usually with two different LCDs (1280x800 and 1440x900). I'm also using 98 DPI in local.conf and a real DisplaySize for both LCDs in xorg.conf (but you can't use different font DPIs for every screen) + "system settings" in firefox font configuration. This makes font size right and doesn't change it between updates.

EDIT: and it looks like gentoo wiki is right and KDE configurator is wrong (or I don't understand how it works at all).

sven · 2006-10-25 08:35:16

ozar wrote:

Friggin' fonts have always kicked my ever-lovin' Linux ass! :evil:

Yeah, mine too! Fonts were the main reason why I didn't convert totally to Linux earlier than 2 years ago. The fuzzyness of fonts was always too much, made me scratch my eyes - and I always went back to Windows. But now I've been happy for over 1 year since I got Terminus for terminal, smoothansi for Blackbox menu and for everything else: Adobe Helvetica 12. Lovely, crisp and readable fonts *hugs*

Arch Linux

#101 2006-06-20 14:50:39

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#102 2006-06-20 15:02:51

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#103 2006-06-20 15:34:51

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#104 2006-06-20 18:58:06

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#105 2006-06-20 22:45:16

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#106 2006-06-21 18:18:22

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#107 2006-06-22 13:14:08

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#108 2006-06-22 13:50:38

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#109 2006-10-16 05:40:23

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#110 2006-10-16 07:08:14

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#111 2006-10-16 15:07:03

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

#112 2006-10-25 08:35:16

Re: freetype/fontconfig, new behavior

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