Re: Rendering with xft and hinting

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 18 o'clock on Mar 17, Soeren Sandmann wrote:

> I prefer Verdana too, but the Luxi fonts that come with XFree86 area
> actually not bad. They just need decent hints instead of those
> terrible, apparently autogenerated, ones they have currently.

TrueType hints are actually harder to generate than the original glyphs; 
saying they 'just need decent hints' is like saying Windows just needs 
decent security.

>         http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/alias.png
>         http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/antialias.png

> Notice in the antialiased version how some of the k has almost
> disappeared and how the m and the a are too bold.

Actually, the 'a' looks more balanced with the remaining letters than the
aliased version; it's darker, but that's because the aliased version is too
light.  The 'V' is pretty broken though; it's too broad, and the diagonals
on the 'k' are too narrow. This is precisely what the TrueType bytecode
hints are supposed to fix. Are you sure the interpreter is enabled?  It
isn't unless you're running Debian, or have installed XFree86 from source
and removed the broken /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 that came with your
distro.

Note that turning on the LCD improvements makes both of these problems less
severe -- taking advantage of the known geometry of the subpixels
effectively doubles the available horizontal resolution.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab