[Fontconfig] [ft-devel] Re: Why did the default font settings change around freetype 2.3 release and why isn't there at least a simple "no blurry fonts" settings?

[Adam Sampson]

"Maarten Maathuis" <madman2003 at gmail.com> writes:

> I do have one small question, why is the autohinter so ugly? (Is
> this on purpose?)

It's an autohinter -- it's doing the best job it can with the limited
information it's got. The Freetype guys have done wonders with it over
the last couple of years; it's not quite as good as a human type
designer can manage yet, but in the latest releases it's often hard to
tell the difference.

I've found it's worth playing with unhinted font rendering if you're
on a big display, though, since that avoids the glyph distortion that
hinting introduces. David Turner and Jinghua Luo (among others) did
some experimental work which used FIR filtering to produce extremely
nice unhinted text rendering on subpixel-capable displays without the
colour fringing that cairo/libXft usually produce; I've put the
patches I'm currently using here:

  http://offog.org/stuff/cairo-fir.diff
  http://offog.org/stuff/libXft-fir.diff

(If you want to see how this looks without messing with your system
libraries, the Gargoyle IF interpreter has a built-in text renderer
that uses the same approach:

  http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

Trying to figure out why Gargoyle's text looked nice on my display was
how I found the patches above...)

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>