Re: evince does not respect system font rendering configuration

[Auguste Pop <auguste gmail com>]

Hi, Carlos.

I have read the bug report you have pointed out and looked at the
patches provided in that thread. If I understand correctly, the
situation is like this: evince calls poppler by default option, and
poppler calls cairo by default option. Both evince and poppler can
force subpixel rendering by setting the appropriate font options. So,
the problem can be solved by getting the default options from desktop
environment in poppler-glib, or evince, or both. As evince is the
application that a desktop user actually use, I still think trying to
set the font options according to user's desktop setting in evince is
not unacceptable, and adding a configuration option is even better.
Actually, I think even if poppler-glib sets the font options
correctly, setting the options again in evince can still be treated as
a safety net.

The comment #25 in that bug report seems related to the practicability
of subpixel text rendering in poppler. As there is already simple
patches that can achieve the expected result, although not perfect, I
think the treatment of technical difficulty in corner case areas can
be postponed later.

This is just my personal opinion, and I would like to see the
philosophy behind the delay in fixing this bug for years.

Best regards,

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Carlos Garcia Campos
<carlosgc gnome org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Auguste Pop's message of vie oct 15 08:55:07 +0200 2010:
>> Hi,
>
> Hi,
>
>> I am not a native speaker, please endure my poor English.
>
> no problem.
>
>> I have been using evince for a while and i noticed that evince does
>> not respect my system settings of font rendering when displaying pdf
>> files.
>>
>> I have searched the web and find several threads and pages talking
>> about this issue. Several different patches exist to solve this
>> problem. In most cases, the patch hard-code the subpixel settings in
>> function pdf_page_render. However, these kind of patches were rejected
>> because of the coding style.
>>
>> My question is since evince is apparently a gnome application, why not
>> use the according gconf to initialize the appropriate
>> cario_font_options_t and pass it to the surface?
>>
>> IMHO, poppler is a library and thus it does not necessarily provide
>> the user settings of the system. It should be the library user's (in
>> this case, evince) responsibility to set the according variables
>> sensible.
>
> It's a known poppler/cairo issue indeed, see this bug:
>
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3307
>
> specially comment 25
>
>> I am not familiar with all the fontconfig, cairo, poppler thing, and I
>> am not sure if getting the subpixel rendering is as simple as setting
>> the appropriate font options. If it is not the case, please ignore
>> this nonsense.
>>
>> Thank you for you kind attention.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Carlos Garcia Campos
> PGP key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x523E6462
>