Am Samstag, 4. Februar 2006 23:08 schrieb Hans-Peter Jansen:
Hi,
since 10.0, I noticed a regression with the font rendering quality, especially the kerning is degraded, compared to 9.3. The situation persists with 10.1 (or even got worser).
I already filed a report against 10.0: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=133086 only to realize, that I'm soliloquizing.
What I've learned from trying to fix the problem myself is that fontconfig and possibly qt3 uses an unofficial API from treetype2 to render stuff, and had a hard time to adjust freetype2 cvs to provide the hooks. Unfortunately, I suffered from some crashes using it (could be unrelated), but not enough time to examine the reasons, thus reverted my local changes that time.
For what is worth it, I'm using the "Bitstream Vera Sans" truetype font for all sans serif uses.
Getting back on topic, I hadn't compared 10.0 with 10.1, but 9.3 with 10.1, and besides a much worser kerning, bold glyphs are notedly less detailed (zugelaufen).
Does nobody noticed this regression and is concerned, too?
It could be, that I'm picky in this respect, but font rendering quality is a very important factor in user experience and acceptance.
How should I interpret the yelling silence on this matter? Sure, people are busy with other things, but I wonder, that there's no interest in the quality of visual appearance in our favorite distro? The matter is, I can avoid not (anymore) supported hardware but I cannot ignore font render regressions, especially since 9.3 did better than successors (not, that it was perfect either). BTW, in the light of the whole free vs. protected discussion, isn't enabling TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER via freetype2-bc.patch also relevant here? I really don't care the license issues involved here, but in my own tests, the font render quality was better with the BC interpreter disabled (as it is the case in 9.3). OTOH, freetype2 is also a strong moving target, and victim of one of the dirtiest patches, too, by exporting an internal interface (ft2-stream-compat.diff). Sure, other projects are involved here too like fontconfig and qt, but this problem isn't that new either. I would like to know more on the rationals behind these decisions, but nobody from the SUSE want to speak up. All I harvested is some bashing on the ft2 ML, how deeply they dislike this procedure, but just bashing me, a suffering user, won't change anything on this topic.. Pete