Bad font rendering / hinting since patch

[Andreas Franz]

Hi Bill,

I'd be one of this happy people, too 😉

But one additional comment to Frank Steiner - IMHO this patch makes no
sense, if anti-aliasing is disabled or hinting is off/slight. You'll
never get perfect WYSIWYG with non-anti-aliasing ...

regards, Andy
> 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
>

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