[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 142940] Enabling pair kerning breaks rendering of many common fonts

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142940

adam.m.fontenot+docfo at gmail.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |---
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED

--- Comment #14 from adam.m.fontenot+docfo at gmail.com ---
(In reply to László Németh from comment #9)
> Pair kerning is for high quality typesetting. It's a de facto standard in
> document editing, not only in desktop publishing.

Thanks for your comment. I was surprised to see a commit reverting this so
quickly and in fact I was going to raise the issue of rendering to PDF myself.
Indeed, I'm worried that a naive solution that simply changes the default would
break high quality PDF rendering. (This hadn't yet occurred to me when I made
the suggestion.)

> As a workaround for the reported problem, enable "View PDF after export", so
> clicking on the PDF export icon, you can see the result with subpixel-based
> rendering, too.

Yes, this is exactly the workaround I've been using when writing anything in
LibreOffice for years now. Write a few paragraphs without proofreading them,
export to PDF, then read back the PDF. That's the only way to avoid a miserable
experience trying to edit/read a document in LibreOffice at the moment.

Although I'm sure you're aware of this, I want to be clear that the status quo
is very bad. A huge number of LibreOffice users have complained about its font
rendering over the last few years, and so I was surprised to learn that there's
seemingly no active effort to fix the complete lack of subpixel positioning for
glyphs in the editor.

---

As I said above, I do agree that simply disabling the pair kerning default
isn't acceptable because of high quality printing and PDF output. But I still
don't think this should be a WONTFIX - there's another alternative. Leave pair
kerning enabled but only apply the setting to output that actually *can* be
meaningfully kerned - i.e. only the contexts which support accurate subpixel
positioning. 

So you will continue to get the high quality desktop publishing output, while
the LibreOffice editor component which handles font rendering will silently
ignore the setting when rendering text (for example, in the Writer window).
Alternatively, I request that a separate setting be added to disable pair
kerning *only* in the editor components while leaving it enabled for desktop
publishing cases.

I'd also point out that if casual users discover that having pair kerning
enabled makes their documents look worse, they will simply disable it, heavily
reducing the quality of their published documents. Writer is a WYSIWYG editor
after all!

---

I'm reopening the bug so that the proposal above can be discussed. I apologize
if reopening a closed bug is against etiquette on this issue tracker - this is
my first issue opened here.

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