Re: evince does not respect system font rendering configuration

[Auguste Pop <auguste gmail com>]

Thank you for pointing out the reason of rejection, Jose.

 An elegant solution for the subpixel rendering in evince needs
evidently a major change in the underlying data structures, because
the rendering of pdf includes more than simple text on top of white
background. I will try to read the code and understand the application
structure first.

However, the configuration option I mentioned earlier does not
necessarily mean a graphical preference dialog. I have an empty file
named last-settings in directory ~/.gnome2/evince, thus I assume
having some configurable options around is not totally forbidden in
evince project.

Best Regards,

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Jose Aliste <jose aliste gmail com> wrote:
> Dear Auguste,
>
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Auguste Pop <auguste gmail com> wrote:
>> 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.
> Well, the problem you mention is a bit different and depends on
> solving the bug that Carlos pointed out, which is a difficult bug to
> solve, fwiw. Poppler is a library, so in the end, you should be able
> to tell poppeler whether to use the hinting or not, and evince should
> probably read wether to do so  from the font configurations in the
> Gnome Control center and then call poppler with the proper options.
>
> Please bear in mind that Evince does not (and won't) have a Preferences dialog.
>
>> 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.
>>
> As you said, this is your opinion. What is happening is that the
> patches weren't considered good enough by the maintainers (and that is
> a decision everyone has to accept, wether we like it or not). The
> philosophy is usally, if the code is not good enough, then don't
> accept it, else the overall quality of the software gets down. Please
> keep in mind that many if not all poppler developers and evince
> developers are volunteers that work on these projects on their free
> time. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you when this bug will be solved,
> and the best thing you can do if you want to solve this bug or any
> other bug is to work on it yourself, that's the freedom in opensource.
> I guess the main message here is that, if you care, please join us to
> make evince and poppler better.
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> José
>
>
>
>
>
>> 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
>>>
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