Font rendering slightly degraded in recent rawhide

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 29 octobre 2009 14:30, Christoph Frieben a écrit :
>
> 2009/10/29 Tomasz Torcz:
>>  There was a change to font properties which changed "Best shapes"
>> to turn on slight hinting.
>
> Good point, but I wonder why this change has been made. It suffices to
> look at two attachments to
>
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=198082
>
> namely
>
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=351609
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=351613
>
> which demonstrate that medium hinting used to give better results,
> namely for MS fonts.

It is well known that some old fonts like Microsoft core fonts have bad/buggy
hinting (MS hides the problem by adding font-specific workarounds in its text
stack). They should certainly never be used to evaluate if a general default
is good or not.

(that is also something to consider before activating the patented bytecode
engine: in-fonts hints are not necessarily better than what freetype
auto-computes in many cases)

> However, this holds at least for Luxi Mono, too ,
> the traditional Red Hat/Fedora monospaced default font.

Luxi Mono is not the Red Hat/Fedora monospaced font and is not even in the
distribution.

> To me, even the current system font looks blurred and uneven when
> slight hinting is chosen instead of medium one. ~C

Unfortunately it is very difficult to get two people to agree on the right
hinting level.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot