On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:52 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm confused how this would not negatively impact the user
experience,
because things like FreeType and HarfBuzz in Fedora have features and
configuration that are non-default that improve the font rendering
capabilities of applications that link to FreeType. I would rather
have our shared maintenance and evolution of font stuff be reused in
Java too...
The rendering is always done in OpenJDK, those libraries are not used
for the actual rendering.
The generation of glyphs types and the metrics are obtained via those
libraries, but it's been ages since the old patented algorithms would
produce better quality, and anyway those would not be available in
Fedora anyway.
There are settings that influence the rendering, which is why
sometimes users have worse quality on KDE vs Gnome, but those aren't
settings in the libraries, are configurations such as environment
variables or gnome properties.
If you experience font quality differences, I would pretty much like
to know, this would be a bug.
They would also be very surprising though, applications such as
IntelliJ bundle their own JDKs, I recall once one argument was exactly
because of "better" font rendering, which is clearly not an actual
argument.
Btw, I know this because I fixed a gazillion font related bugs in
OpenJDK in the past, most of which in the OpenJDK 6 and 7 era, I
rarely ever had to touch 8 or later.
Cheers,
Mario
--
Mario Torre
Manager, Software Engineering, OpenJDK
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