Bad font rendering / hinting since patch

[Frank Steiner]

Hi Bill,

Bill Spitzak wrote:

> The results you don’t like are clearly the intention of the patch.
> 
> It it making the letters be different so that the spacing between
> them letters is less irregular. The irregular spacing can easily be
> seen in the sample screenshots. It is possible to have both but this
> requires the letters to be further apart than they should be and
> makes it not possible to get WYSIWYG.

thanks a lot for your explanations! While I understand the reason
for the patch as you describe it, it does have a negative impact
in quite some situations. Please take a look at the attached
screenshots, all done in the recent Libreoffice. There are situations
where otherwise sharp letters get blurry (lo2.png). Small fonts
might get way harder to read (lo3.png) and even for normal size
the text just gets more fuzzy and that makes it harder to read
long texts (lo4.png).

Given that there are quite a few web reports (or complaints) about
these effects after libcairo 17.4, would you perhaps consider a
possibilty to disable this patch by e.g. an environment variable
or Xresources setting?  Thus, keeping the default rendering as is
intended by the patch, but allowing those of us, who dislike this
rendering, to revert to the old rendering style?

Libreoffice similarly allows to change some features by environment
variables (e.g. for allowing full hinting), freetype also does it
(like using FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35"
to get the old font rendering), so maybe libcairo could also allow
something like that?

It would make quite a few people very happy I guess :-)

cu,
Frank

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner   Web:  http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/
Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik    Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/
LMU, Amalienstr. 17           Phone: +49 89 2180-4049
80333 Muenchen, Germany       Fax:   +49 89 2180-99-4049
* Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. *
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