[cairo] Sub-pixel Font Filtering in 1.10

[Lance Hepler]

Hi again, Freddie,

> > Aside from the bad names, one of the primary justifications I've seen
> > for changing the filtering is to render fonts with horrible hinting
> > instructions (or systems with horrible hinting implementations) with
> > less color-fringing. Personally, I see sub-pixel rendering as something
> > that doesn't even make sense to do unless you've got a well-behaving
> > system, (both font and hinting engine), in the first place.
> >
> > So fixing up "bad" color fringing in a case like this is really just a
> > band-aid for an entirely different problem. The better way to avoid
> > color fringing in such a case is to just not use sub-pixel rendering,
> > (or fix the broken font or hinting implementation).
>
> It is not a band-aid at all. Cairo currently uses an intra-pixel filter taken
> from libXft. This filter is *technically inferior* to finite impulse response
> filter (FIR) which is used by: CoreText (OS X), ClearType (Windows), Qt (pre
> 4.5) and FreeType (post 2.3 as an option). The FIR type filters are inter-pixel
> filters (so the filtering is performed across sub-pixel boundaries --- just as
> it should be).
>
> The hinting argument is also heavily flawed; it is hinting itself that is a
> band-aid --- a hack from a time when anti-aliasing was not practical. The
> effect of hinting is to distort the outlines of glyphs --- and hence it *can
> not* be used when rendering freely scalable text, such as that in a PDF
> document. So if you want your system to be able to render PDF documents with
> sub-pixel rendering you need an FIR-type filter.
>
> If one looks at a PDF document in Evince (and it has to be Evince, not Okular
> due to the way Poppler works) you're looking at un-hinted text rendered by
> Cairo. However, you'll also notice a lack of sub-pixel rendering (even if it
> is enabled for the rest of the system). One reason for this is because the
> default Cairo filter would awful colour fringes.
>
> All modern operating systems are moving away from hinting, as of 2010. Apple
> ditched it back in 2001 with the release of OS X, Microsoft second with the
> release of the WPF (.NET, all text is freely scalable) and most recently with
> the release of DirectWrite. Hinting is, for all practical purposes, a dead
> end.
>
> I discuss these hinting- and implementation-related issues at length in my
> article on font rasterisation:
>
>  http://freddie.witherden.org/pages/font-rasterisation/>

Oh thank GOODNESS, some strong objective arguments in favor of modern
SPR. We desperately need these almost as much as we need a technical
solution to this debacle.

> Personally, I am not convinced there is a need to directly configure the sub-
> pixel filter. (Unlike say with hinting and anti-aliasing where a sound
> technical case can be made for changing these --- such as when requiring
> freely scalable text.) Just respect Fontconfig and everyone wins.

I agree, however in this instance, any of the more recent cairo-SPR
patches proposed thus far respect fontconfig. IMHO, the only piece of
software that does not respect fontconfig settings is freetype, which
silently disables its SPR.

Lance