Font rendering slightly degraded in recent rawhide

[Christoph Frieben]

2009/10/29 Nicolas Mailhot:
> 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.

The empirical result remains, however, and it is consistent with that
of any other
font that I have looked at.

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

It was the default monospaced font for RHL 8/9, Fedora Core 1/2/3/4/5/6,
RHEL 3/4/5 and still **is** for current RHEL 5.4. I thus consider legitimate to
comment on it, too, as I expect to be not the only person being attached
to using it ..

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

I find the effect quite deterring and was actually bothered by it before even
getting aware that the default hinting had been altered.
Any feedback by other users is thus welcome in order to rule out a single
user impression. Finally, I'd be interested to know why the hinting has been
changed at all. There is no bug ID or any factual reason given in the
changelog of package gnome-settings-daemon. ~C