Monday 26 October 2009

Mark the difference (ugly fonts in Fedora?)

So, in my previous post there started appearing discussion about fonts antialiasing. So I though it would be better to spin off this discussion in a post of it's on, installed freetype-freeworld (which improved drastically fonts in chromium, but did nothing with gtk), fired up gimp and created this (click on the image to see it in its original size if it looks blurry):

The first line is no antialiasing, no hinting, the second one is antialiasing only, the third one is antialiasing+hinting and last one is antialiasing+hinting with forced autohinter. Looks like no hinting or autohinter is what can be achieved without installing the package from rpmfusion, while the third line needs the package with patented stuff in. Apparently, no antialiasing isn't a solution – we're not living in stone age, antialiasing without hinting is blurry and autohinter works good only for small sizes, on the other hand, the hinting without autohinter breaks on simple japanese… Make your own image about what's best.

And as a bonus: hinting without autohinter in chromium


autohinter in midori


Dunno how you, but I see the autohinter as best working for me.

1 comment:

Kevin Kofler said...

Those Japanese characters probably don't have any hinting bytecode. (If you compare the renderings with the bytecode interpreter and with no hinting, you'll see they're basically the same for those characters.) Freetype should probably be fixed to automatically fallback to the autohinter whenever the font doesn't provide hinting bytecode.