I am back, On Thursday, July 14th, 2022 at 12:16 PM, Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:

On 7/14/22 18:05, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

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Am 14.07.22 um 10:24 schrieb Mathias Homann:

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Am Donnerstag, 14. Juli 2022, 09:56:50 CEST schrieb Wolfgang Rosenauer:

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My monitor is not totally recent but certainly not old and quite decent. Still the font was so bad that it was already impacting my work. I don't have screenshots from that time but it was really really horrible. Most noticeable for me in Thunderbird when reading and writing mails which is what I do half of the day.

I'm looking at FullHD on a 14" Laptop screen (it's actually 4k but who would WANT that resolution on a screen that small) - so I'm at 159DPI, and fonts look awesome. I have enabled full hinting, tho.

I also looked over the noto fonts in kfontsel (I don't use them that much), and they look fine at 8x magnification.

Oh, and I'm on TW20220712.

Are you talking about the current state? Yes, everything is fine right now. I was talking about the few days in TW where the new fonts were installed. That has been rolled back a while ago.

I believe the proposal would be to fix that issue by modifying the Noto fonts so they are smaller, instead I was going to look at fixing the issue by creating a secondary font pattern that isn't installed by default so that its easier to provide a curated set of fonts for users who don't need anything special and a second set for users who have a use case where something extra would benefit them, such as this case where someone may have need or a desire to have a good set of fonts covering all languages or maybe providing a larger selection that people doing some form of design work can have out of the box.

I also need to double check that on languages the Adobe fonts don't cover the noto fonts get pulled in via supplements and used by default. But I may not get to that for a couple of weeks.

Oh, then I should hold off on doing the -extra package split (as detailed in another email I sent to this list which is not in this thread). I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't a problem with the Noto Fonts packages themselves. The only benefit is split would have had is that the individual packages would be smaller.(Because a bunch of them would have the "extra" weights moved into new packages) But the shell script used to generate the specfile would be further complicated. I however still think that Unhinted OTFs (and later Variable fonts once the upstream issues are fixed) would be beneficial as the formats encode the same amount of information, but in much less space. This especially goes for Variable fonts where not only are they even smaller than the Unhinted OTF files they replace, they also can support way more font weights and other neat features while being very compact.(for any font nerds like me, look up what variable fonts can do if you haven't already, its pretty amazing) If as Alois said:

On openSUSE, the autohinter is disabled for CFF fonts to prevent interfering with native hinting. Maybe Fedora doesn't do this, so the autohinter kicks in? It should be technically feasible to re-enable the> autohinter using fontconfig for Noto fonts if this is indeed the difference.

Then I should start looking into enabling the autohinter as that probably explains why the Unhinted OTFs looked ugly to some people. I was not aware that it was disabled on openSUSE since I had read elsewhere that it is "enabled by default for Linux". Thanks, Gordon Leung