registry team mailing list archive

[Piernik <209256@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please excuse me if this is not the best place to bring this topic, but
what exactly is the point of supporting all these Xft.<option>
xresources?

Maybe I'm a bit uniformed but this stuff is broken by design anyway
(hence fontconfig). I mean, toolkits and whatnot shouldn't give a f..k
about those options because all they should care about is fontconfig.
Setting some Xft.<foo> is global (is terms of fonts) and this is what
makes it almost totally useless. Everyone who digs fonts knows that you
can't get all your fonts right just by setting some global options. Most
good quality fonts (mostly from professional font foundries, but not
only) require "tweaks" in hintstyle etc. to look good (in other words -
they only look good with e.g. hintstyle=hintslight). If you set
Xft.hintstyle to hintmedium, you get one group of fonts properly shaped
and in the same time some other group of fonts to look suboptimal or
unacceptable.

[This is also a good place to point out that approach taken by tools
like gnome-appearance-properties (which tries to screw^Wsave the world
by playing with Xft xresources/xsettings via gnome-settings-daemon) is
blatantly naive, except if you're blind or just used to bad looking
screen fonts.]

"But these are just Xft defaults and we should obey them" you may say.
Yeah, but dealing with those legacy options brings SO MUCH CONFUSION and
bizarre bugs I lack words to describe it. Every toolkit/app and their
dog tries to do something with them and almost always fails to do it
right (perhaps because it's impossible to do so). Let's take emacs for
an example. Emacs can use gtk2 and fontconfig, but not cairo. It pretty
much succeeds but what's striking is that it basically fucks up
FcPatterns by modifying them with stuff from Xft xresources. After
getting them from fontconfig, so any carefully crafted (font/pattern-
specific or not) fontconfig configuration gets ignored. It'll screw it
even if Xft.<foo> stuff isn't set. It's a disaster. Qt, OpenOffice, Java
runtime... ugh. *Even cairo can't get its shit together.*

The bottom line is: why not use fontconfig for everything, so
app/toolkit developers won't do stupid things like the mentioned above?

Freetype is pretty capable of providing good results, but bugs like this
simply prevent demanding users from making use of it.

Also, If you don't believe this stuff, just google around, see how users
are struggling in confusion.

Sorry for the style of this comment. I couldn't help myself. My English
is so poor I can only rant ;)

-- 
different hintstyle issue
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/209256
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Registry
Administrators, which is the registrant for libcairo.