Make subpixel smoothing default?

[Callum Lerwick]

On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 10:38 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> It depends a lot on your monitor. If you've got relatively large pixels, the
> colored fringes can be very visible and distracting. If you've got a
> high-PPI monitor, it can look quite good -- but then, of course, you need
> it less.
> 
> I also find that it looks much worse for light text on black background
> (i.e. old-school terminal windows) than for dark text on light (the typical
> modern default terminals and most modern web sites).

I find that subpixel and hinting seem to interact sub-optimally. Setting
the hinting on "full" seems to work best, (This seems to be default
now?) but some fonts still look really bad. What seems to happen is
freetype is not keeping stroke widths a minimum of 3 subpixels wide,
which makes for nasty color fringing on thin vertical strokes. (Should
they always be a *multiple* of 3 subpixels wide? Some experimentation is
needed here...)

Have the autohinting hackers looked in to this at all?

> But here's my concern with making it the default: if you get the subpixel
> layout wrong, it looks very very bad. What percentage of monitors are RGB
> instead of BGR?

I have an old laptop with a BGR LCD, but I'm probably the only one...

We could probably do with a friendly subpixel tuner...
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