[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?

[Maarten Maathuis]

I would have a hard time getting used to the autohinter and i probably
won't. I have pretty much settled for byte code hinting with anti
aliasing (as opposed to the screenshots i posted, which have anti
aliasing off). The eventual solution to the problem of of smooth fonts
is really high dpi screens, but that lies (hopefully) in the future.

Thank you for your replies (@everyone), hope i didn't annoy you too much ;-)

Maarten.

On 5/21/07, David Turner <david at freetype.org> wrote:
> Hello Maarten,
>
> On Thu, 17 May 2007 11:00:46 +0200, "Maarten Maathuis" <madman2003 at gmail.com> said:
> > I do have one small question, why is the autohinter so ugly? (Is this on
> > purpose?)
> >
>
> Of course, it *is* on purpose. You see, we at the FreeType Team, we take pride in
> producing *only* the ugliest and most disgusting text rendering we can get. Our motto
> is, after all, "Proudly making users vomit since 1996 !" :o)
>
> More seriously, the auto-hinter produces text that is a lot closer to the original
> character shapes than anything you'll get from a highly tuned bytecoded TrueType font.
>
> What I mean is that what you consider "good" text here is a highly distorted version
> of the original font; it's more similar to a hand-coded bitmap than anything else and
> there is no way that the auto-hinter can match this kind of work with the small CPU
> and memory resources it can use.
>
> And personally, I'm pretty tired of bytecoded text rendering. I find it a lot more ugly
> than the auto-hinter's output. that's not to say that the latter can't be improved but
> your mileage may vary.
>
> - David Turner
> - The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)
>
>
> > Maarten.
> >
> > On 5/17/07, Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Here are some screenshots, were the bad.jpg is a good approximation
> > > > of the original situation.
> > >
> > > Please try ftview and/or ftdiff on this particular font.
> > >
> > > > > > Am i again asking the wrong mailinglist?
> > > > >
> > > > > Yes, your question really belongs to freetype list.
> > >
> > > Not necessarily.
> > >
> > > > > I don't know why Werner sent you this way.  Probably because he
> > > > > saw the XML snippets in your mail and automatically thought you
> > > > > have a fontconfig question.
> > >
> > > :-) Indeed.  I need a way to reproduce a problem in a generic way, and
> > > even the before/after snapshot doesn't really help, except that the
> > > `good' one looks like having bytecode hinting enabled and the `bad'
> > > one disabled.
> > >
> > >
> > >     Werner
> > >
>