[Bug 708525] New: hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

Summary: hinting turned off even for large fonts

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Summary: hinting turned off even for large fonts
           Product: Fedora
           Version: 15
          Platform: Unspecified
        OS/Version: Unspecified
            Status: NEW
          Severity: unspecified
          Priority: unspecified
         Component: pango
        AssignedTo: [e-mail]
        ReportedBy: [e-mail]
         QAContact: [e-mail]
                CC: [e-mail],
                    [e-mail]
    Classification: Fedora
      Story Points: ---

Created attachment 501397
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501397
Screen shot of office writer document with different size fonts in same
families.

Description of problem:

On my fedora 15 system, the fonts all render terribly by default, being
completely thin and spindly. After much investigation, I find various
settings down in the /etc/fonts config files to do things like turn
off hinting for fonts smaller than 7.5 (what units 7.5 are in, I'm not
sure), but in fact hinting seems to be turned off for fonts up to
point size 13 as the attached screenshot of a libreoffice document
seems to show.

So many pieces are involved in font rendering, I don't know for sure
if pango is the right component for this, but it is my best guess.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pango-1.28.4-1.fc15.x86_64
cairo-1.10.2-3.fc15.x86_64
fontconfig-2.8.0-3.fc15.x86_64

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1.See screenshot of office writer image
2.
3.

Actual results:
All fonts 13 points and under rendered incredibly spindly.

Expected results:
Better font rendering.

Additional info:

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #1 from Suvayu  2011-05-27 18:57:21 EDT ---
Created attachment 501423
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501423
Screenshot demonstrating poorly rendered fonts

I am seeing similar badly rendered fonts across all applications on my desktop.
I have attached a screen shot of Emacs showing the problem.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #2 from Tom Horsley  2011-05-27 18:58:36 EDT ---
Created attachment 501424
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501424
Same .odt file in Okular

This is interesting, the same document viewed in the Okular program looks quite
good. No spindly rendering for size 12 fonts versus size 13. Perhaps this will
provide a clue to someone who actually understands the twisty paths that font
rendering goes through in different apps.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #3 from Tom Horsley  2011-05-27 19:03:34 EDT ---
Though now that I look at it closer, Okular appears to be utterly ignoring the
fonts from the .odt file and using some font of its own (which renders well
:-).

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

James Cloos  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #4 from James Cloos  2011-05-27 19:17:32 EDT ---
I took a look at the attachment 501397.

The DejaVu and Liberation examples there are rendered with hinting enabled.

Specifically native hinted grayscale rendering.

That is how those fonts were engineered to appear.
> From the description, I suspect you are used to freetype’s autohinted rendering

and would like it back.

The easiest way is to enable the 10-autohint.conf fontconfig file.

In general, that would mean doing:

:; ln -s ../conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

as root or adding:

<include>/etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf</include>

to your ~/.fonts.conf if you do not want to change it for all users.

Fedora might have moved fontconfig’s /etc/fonts/conf.avail to /usr/share (there
was talk of doing that; I do not know the outcome).

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #5 from Tom Horsley  2011-05-27 19:31:41 EDT ---
The DejaVu difference isn't too bad, but Liberation is really supposed to jump
from barely visible spindly lines to bold confident looking text just from the
jump 1 point size? Hard to believe. (Try several other sizes of Liberation in
the same doc and the jump between 12 and 13 becomes even more dramatic.) I'll
definitely try turning the autohint on and see what happens.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #6 from Tom Horsley  2011-05-27 19:55:33 EDT ---
Created attachment 501427
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501427
autohinted version of same LibreOffice doc.

Oh yes! Autohinting is the very thing! I will no longer go blind, and 12 point
Liberation now just looks like a healthy younger brother to 13 point Liberation
instead of a malnourished distant cousin :-). Thanks for the pointer. (I can
only assume the font designers never look at their fonts on anything except 300
DPI displays if the rendering without autohinting is the appearance they
actually want).

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Suvayu  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #7 from Suvayu  2011-05-28 14:16:30 EDT ---
Autohinting solved all issues for me too. All applications are now back to what
I am used to. Thanks. :)

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Erik Sands  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #8 from Erik Sands  2011-06-03 20:05:45 EDT ---
I have nothing more to add other than mentioning this issue affects me too.  In
fact, it has caused me too much eye-strain and I've switched to a different OS
for the time being (the eye-strain lead to real headaches and a dizzy feeling).
 I was not aware of the ability to use auto-hinting until recently.

In any case, I find it hard to believe that the fonts rendered with BCI are
really supposed to be so blurred and jagged.  In a sense, this is my first time
with a true accessibility issue.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Miguel  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #9 from Miguel  2011-06-06 06:46:04 EDT ---
Fonts are terrible in FC15.. Never seen nothing like this. I've tried every
suggestions made.. the best alternative seems to be using droid fonts.. but
it's not acceptable yet.. I've used Fedora since the beginning of the project,
but now I'm thinking dump it

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #10 from Mihai Harpau  2011-06-06 07:36:09 EDT ---
Maybe bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=547532 give some
explanations.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

ed briggs  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #11 from ed briggs  2011-06-06 23:39:32 EDT ---
Fonts are the worst I've seen in any distro. Especially in the web browsers.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Nicolas Mailhot  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]
          Component|pango                       |fontconfig

--- Comment #12 from Nicolas Mailhot  2011-06-07 03:40:02 EDT ---
In F15 there are two changes :

1. force Cantarell on everyone just because it's "new" and "not used
elsewhere", despite the fact ils lacks coverage so you get mixed glyphs as soon
as you use more than the most basic latin

2. activate BCI in fontconfig to get window-ish font appearance (it was
patented it must be good, in the cigarettes are bad for your health let's be
'leet and smoke teen logic sense)

Both there changes were known to produce massive fallout and have been applied
without concertation. There's no need to argue there (those changes are not
bugs, they are deliberate setting changes by gnome3 fedora people), make some
noise on mailing lists and irc if you want to change the maintainers minds

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Lonni J Friedman  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #13 from Lonni J Friedman  2011-08-02 12:26:59 EDT ---
/me too

upgraded from F14 to F15, and all the fonts were Redhat-6.0 vintage ugly.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Marius Andreiana  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #14 from Marius Andreiana  2011-08-18 14:07:05 EDT ---
Could this get fixed at least for F16?

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         AssignedTo|[e-mail]    |[e-mail]

--- Comment #15 from Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client  2012-01-10 10:41:59 EST ---
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning
to the new owner of this component.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         AssignedTo|[e-mail]          |[e-mail]

--- Comment #16 from Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client  2012-03-21 21:38:10 EDT ---
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning
to the new owner of this component.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #17 from Akira TAGOH  2012-04-05 05:44:02 EDT ---
To make sure, what do you expect to see a fix in fontconfig on this? given that
the summary says it all, globally turning off autohinter may affects
everything. it would take a lot of time for testing etc. for a solution in
Fedora, having a workaround to turn off autohinter in the fontconfig rules in
the problematic font packages sounds realistic to me though. any comments?

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Akira TAGOH  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
               Flag|                            |needinfo?(horsley1953@gmail
                   |                            |.com)

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Tom Horsley  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
               Flag|needinfo?(horsley1953@gmail |
                   |.com)                       |

--- Comment #18 from Tom Horsley  2012-04-09 05:23:56 EDT ---
As long as activating the magic symlink described above in comment 4 continues
to work, I'm perfectly happy. Judging from practical results I have seen the
autohinting for everything always works much better. Font rendering (or perhaps
it is just the choice of default fonts) still always looks better on Ubuntu
than on Fedora, but with autohinting, I can get Fedora close.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Akira TAGOH  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Version|15                          |rawhide

--- Comment #19 from Akira TAGOH  ---
Well, enabling autohint by default may be risky for updates. moving to rawhide.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Kamil Páral  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]
              Flags|                            |needinfo?([e-mail])

--- Comment #20 from Kamil Páral  ---
Akira, what is the status of this? Is it enabled by default in Fedora 18?

I have just upgraded from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 Beta and I noticed _awful_
rendering of some fonts in Firefox. It happens just for some pages. Wikipedia
is OK. But Google+/Google Reader etc look terrible. I have found out they ask
for Arial, which is translated to Liberation Sans.

I have seen the feature page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FontconfigEnableAutohinting
It doesn't say how to find out whether autohinting is on or off and how to
change it.

In my /etc/fonts/conf.d/ there is no symlink for 10-autohint.conf, which
indicates it could be off. But then I saw the pictures you rendered and that's
exactly the problem I see. Look at this:
http://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/tmp/hints/liberationsans-hinting.png
Everything is sharp and readable here. Then look at this:
http://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/tmp/hints/liberationsans-autohinting.png
This is blurry and unreadable. Compare word "jumps" in sizes 15-17, it's blurry
as hell with autohint. Reading web pages with this font puts a lot of strain on
my eyes.

How can I turn it off and verify whether this is the source of the problems or
something else?

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Akira TAGOH  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
              Flags|needinfo?([e-mail]) |

--- Comment #21 from Akira TAGOH  ---
For Liberation fonts issue, see Bug#856239. no errors in fontconfig for that at
all.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #22 from Tom Horsley  ---
In case anyone has been trying to get this autohinting to work in fedora 18, I
found that not only did the master location of the 10-autohint.conf file change
(it now lives in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf), but the
content changed as well. The f18 version has an "append" operation rather than
an "assign" operation. The only way I found to make fonts look reasonable on my
display was to copy rather than symlink the file and edit it to change "append"
to "assign". At last, I can see again!

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Karl Fischer (kmf)  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #23 from Karl Fischer (kmf)  ---
Tom Horsley's sugestion worked for me.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525#c22

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Bojan Smojver  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]

--- Comment #24 from Bojan Smojver  ---
Yeah, in F-18 even symlinking the autohint config doesn't do the correct thing.
Fonts like DejaVu just look too thin in FF and Evo's HTML renderer, for
instance.

The change was actually upstram, in fontconfig sources.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #25 from Akira TAGOH  ---
(In reply to comment #22)
> In case anyone has been trying to get this autohinting to work in fedora 18,
> I found that not only did the master location of the 10-autohint.conf file
> change (it now lives in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf),
> but the content changed as well. The f18 version has an "append" operation
> rather than an "assign" operation. The only way I found to make fonts look
> reasonable on my display was to copy rather than symlink the file and edit
> it to change "append" to "assign". At last, I can see again!

That change was to respect the configuration in the desktops. if you are
expecting to see that fix in fontconfig, I won't do that as I canceled the
feature in f18. if this is DejaVu specific, I'll reassign this to it though,
otherwise you may need to file a separate bug to the appropriate packages to
collect/improve it.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #26 from Bojan Smojver  ---
What I don't understand is this: autohinting is supposed by be poor man's
hinting. However, at least on my systems, autohinted fonts looks significantly
better than anything hinting can do (using Deja Vu). If I turn autohinting off,
some of the fonts actually look completely unreadable. Confusing...

Just FYI.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #27 from Nicolas Mailhot  ---
(In reply to comment #26)
> What I don't understand is this: autohinting is supposed by be poor man's
> hinting.

This is FUD spread by proponents of windows-95-like font rendering

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #29 from Marius Andreiana  ---
Looks like FC19beta has "assign" by default, metioned in comment #22.

Is this fixed?

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #30 from Akira TAGOH  ---
No. no changes in even f19.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

--- Comment #31 from Fedora End Of Life  ---
This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora 
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is 
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no 
longer maintained. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now this bug will
be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '19'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 19 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

[Bug 708525] hinting turned off even for large fonts

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708525

Akira TAGOH  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |CLOSED
         Resolution|---                         |WONTFIX
        Last Closed|                            |2015-01-26 04:32:25

--- Comment #32 from Akira TAGOH  ---
As I tried and failed to make the autohinting default, this should be fixed in
a font package. please file a bug against a font package you think it would be
better enabling the autohinting. I won't fix this in fontconfig as a global
change.