Font rendering in F13

[Ilyes Gouta]

Hi Roberto,

> My experience has always been that the autohinter is way better than
> all the bci stuff.

Mine tells a different story, especially when dealing with standard'
fonts such as Arial, Tahoma and even Courier New.

What I'd like to see is a true, fully featured font rendering
experience on the Linux desktop. Sadly, this goes through the bci
thing, a method for custom glyph control/reconstruction, which patents
expired recently.

-Ilyes Gouta

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Roberto Ragusa <mail at robertoragusa.it> wrote:
> Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> Hey,
>>
>> early in the F13 cycle, we enabled the bytecode interpreter in our
>> freetype package, since the patents on that have expired last fall.
>> Unfortunately, it turned out that many free fonts don't actually benefit
>> from this, and actually look worse with the bci. The reason for that is
>> that without the bci, freetype uses its autohinter on all fonts, but
>> with the bci turned on, it only applies hints to fonts which have them,
>> and leaves other fonts alone.
>>
>> Behdad investigated the situation, and we have a plan to fix this, but
>> doing it properly requires enhancements in multiple places (freetype,
>> fontconfig, pango), and will not be ready in time for F13.
>
> My experience has always been that the autohinter is way better than
> all the bci stuff.
>
> I understand that the target of these modifications is to have the bci
> where available and the autohinter where bci info is missing.
>
> Will there be an option to say "always use the autohinter?"?
> If not, I would miss it badly.
>
> --
>   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it
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