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Message #121545
[Bug 415134] Re: Bad font rendering (Freetype, bytecode interpreter)
Don't enable medium or full hinting on TrueType fonts, use hintslight.
There is still no full ClearType support in 2.6.2.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/415134
Title:
Bad font rendering (Freetype, bytecode interpreter)
Status in freetype package in Ubuntu:
New
Bug description:
A screenshot demonstrating the issues: http://zi.fi/fonttest/fonttest-
bytecode-enabled.png
The shot was taken with Ubuntu 9.04 fontconfig-config default
settings, AA enabled, full hinting enabled, subpixel rendering
disabled (in Gnome settings). The text is written in OpenOffice (
http://zi.fi/fonttest/fonttest.odt ).
Times New Roman italic z is missing the diagonal line (or in fact it
is just extremely thin). All Microsoft fonts display bad kerning
(possibly due to OpenOffice) and sudden line thickness changes in
italic text of different sizes (hinting switching to 2 pixel lines
instead of 1 pixel would explain the change, but without hinting as is
the case in italic text this makes no sense). The free fonts (which
presumably contain no bytecode) have no hinting at all, not even in
regular rendering (soft edges on FreeSans and FreeSerif titles).
Freetype autohinter should be used at least for the fonts with no
bytecode in them and possibly for all fonts, as it often seems to
produce better results than the bytecode does. This is because the
bytecode is designed for non-AA rendering. Microsoft's workaround is
to disable AA entirely in smaller sizes, but that doesn't produce very
good results either.
I am reporting this against Ubuntu because apparently it is the
patches that Ubuntu use that break this instead of Freetype itself
being broken. Times New Roman bytecode in deed seems broken (for anti-
aliased rendering at least), but an easier and possibly better fix
would be to enable the autohinter, which seems to have very good
rendering quality.
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