Why does Red Hat render fonts thicker (and arguably better)?

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 23:45, Havoc Pennington wrote: 
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 06:43:03PM -0700, James J. Ramsey wrote:
> > I've noticed that antialiased fonts render differently
> > on Red Hat than other distros I've tried. The fonts
> > render slightly thicker, and the fuzziness is less
> > obvious. I've been trying, mostly out of curiosity, to
> > find out what makes the difference, but have had no
> > luck tracking down whatever changes or adjustments Red
> > Hat made.
> > 
> > How does Red Hat do it?
> > 
> 
> Font configuration is in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, and when running GNOME
> also overridden by the stuff in Preferences->Fonts

Actually, I've tried to keep most rendering configuration (for
non-GNOME) in /etc/X11/Xresources. The relevant part is:

! hintstyle: medium means that (for Postscript fonts) we
! position the stems for maximum constrast and consistency
! but don't force the stems to integral widths. hintnone,
! hintslight, and hintfull are the other possibilities.
Xft.hintstyle: hintmedium
Xft.hinting: true

Note that this part requires a patch to Xft that is *not*
upstream.  XFree86-4.2.99.3-loadtarget.patch ... the rendering
code is there in standard FreeType, but there is no way 
of configuring it through standard Xft.

Regards,
					Owen