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barlad
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 5:29 pm    Post subject: New freetype 2.1.4 Reply with quote

Just installed the new freetype... and well, "woah!". Changes are huge, to be honest right now I am not sure wether everything is b0rked or working. I cannot say wether or not fonts look good... it is just, different.
Arial looks more flattened at small sizes and as a whole fonts look "bolder" and maybe a bit more big than usual.
Sometimes I just think it looks much more regular and that it tends to be the best fonts I have ever seen (far superior to windows) but err... I am not sure.

Anyway, the reason of my post is that this update wasted the week-end I spent trying to get fonts working under Phoenix since now I am back to some more or less good fonts but way too bold and maybe even too big.

Let me know if any of you encounter the same problem please and if you get any solution :)

Oh, on a side note... freetype 2.1.4 does not work with the Liquid window style for me, I get a small space between window title and window menu.
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Damasz
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 5:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It seems in this release the Bytecode Interpreter is disabled by default.

According to http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/2.1.3-explained.html#bytecode it is not needed anymore and the auto hinter should give better results.

I've just rebuild my freetype (2.1.4) with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled ( USE="cjk" emerge freetype ) and I find the results a lot better with bold text.

I'm staying with the Bytecode Interpreter for now! :D

(the USE="cjk" is normaly used for eastern language support, but in the freetype ebuild it is only used for the Bytecode Interpreter, so you don't have to edit the ebuild to get the BI :wink: )
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barlad
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 6:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks, re compiling with the bytecode interpreter put everything back to where it was. Only mosfet liquid is not working but that is not such a big loss. That said... I cannot say if it is really better with the BI or not. What a dilemna :).
That was easier before... font sucked so we could just complain, now we have to chose between good looking fonts and... good looking fonts.
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Evangelion
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 6:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

screenshots? Preferrably before/after ones ;)
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floam
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i wonder why the auto-hinting looks so bad, it supposed to be far superior to the bci
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barlad
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 6:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hehe, thanks for being the judge... you are the one who is going to decide what font I will stick to ;)

Here are two huge screenshots with/without bytecode interpreter (sorry, it's really big but I put no compression to ensure fonts would still be displayed correctly in png, its about 700ko each picture). I put two pictures of Phoenix, one of Konqueror, one of Kmail and one of the KDE menus. You can see the icons too on the left part.

with bytecode on : www.europaguild.com/pixmaps/screenbyte.png
without bytecode: www.europaguild.com/pixmaps/screennobyte.png
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Damasz
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 7:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

IMHO the bytecode version looks a lot better, the fonts are a lot crisper for bold letters (look at your nick in the gentoo forums). Then again, the normal letters are sometimes a bit to thin... (for instance, the kxwz letters)
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qnx
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 7:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ohhh gosh..Thanks for that tip about bytecode interpreter... The new 2.1.4 messed up all my fonts, it was almost unreadable...And I have to work with a school essey tonight =) Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Jacob
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Evangelion
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The one WITH bytecode looks better IMO. The one without looks.... messy
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yokem55
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 7:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

On this laptop, with subpixel hinting enabled, with the bytecode interpreter on, smaller sized normal fonts look too "thin," while bolded and larger fonts look fine. With the bytecode interpreter off, then the small, normal fonts don't get rendered too thin, but bold fonts are over smudged and blurry.

Sigh.....
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Lovechild
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 7:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Funny, I hate the bytecode hinter... I LOVE the fonts the native hinter renders..
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 9:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

On my system with a g400 16mb @ 1024x768 and x at 100dpi I like the bytecode interpreter turned off. With bci on the font stems are uneven and the antialiasing looks bad. Both in freetype 2.1.3 with the smooth hack and 2.14 without it. I can't seen to get my fonts looking like the screenshot with bci turned on.

JohnY
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dreambox
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.angelfire.com/linux/dreambox/index.html

Others screenshots 2.1.3-r2 vs 2.1.4. In 2.1.4 byte interpreter is off. Antialias is disabled for fontsize < 10. I leave judgment to gentooers... :lol: :lol: :cry:
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had been working with 2.1.4 rc2 for a while, on which I base that the bci is still better than the auto-hinter for most fonts.
As no big improvements have been done from rc2 to final, I think this is still the case.
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kappax
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 09, 2003 11:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

do i have to do anything other than emerge it?
I am comeing from a normal emerge of
freetype-2.1.3-r2.ebuild
to a
USE="cjk" emerge freetype-2.1.4.ebuild

and i dont see any difference :/
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jagerman
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 6:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

kappax wrote:
and i dont see any difference :/


Yup, that's the point - going from 2.1.3 to 2.1.4 _without_ that USE="cjk" makes things look really ugly.
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kappax
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 7:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

jagerman wrote:
kappax wrote:
and i dont see any difference :/


Yup, that's the point - going from 2.1.3 to 2.1.4 _without_ that USE="cjk" makes things look really ugly.


i used the USE="cjk"
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asimon
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 8:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I found this in the Changelog of the freetype ebuild:

Quote:

Disabled bytcode interpreter for anything but cjk use flag, using
the autohinter instead as suggested by the freetype team.


But in the source tarball I found this in docs/TRUETYPE:
Quote:

If you are using TrueType fonts on your system, you most probably
want to enable it [the bytecode interpreter] manually by doing the following


So does the freetype team suggest to enable and disable the bytecode interpreter at the same time?
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Koon
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 8:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

asimon wrote:
So does the freetype team suggest to enable and disable the bytecode interpreter at the same time?

In fact, the Gentoo freetype team used to enable the bytecode interpreter by default, so in the ebuild changelog they talk about enabled -> disabled change.

In the vanilla sources, the Freetype team disables the bytecode interpreter by default (for copyright reasons), so in their docs they talk about disabled -> enabled change...

- EDIT - Rereading your post, my mistake : I think it's just that the changelog is more up-to-date than the docs ;)
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dreambox
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 9:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.angelfire.com/linux/dreambox/index.html

Now, 2.1.3-r2 vs 2.1.4 vs 2.1.4 Byte Code enabled. Antialias is disabled for fontsize < 10.

The most ugly fonts I had were with Mozilla. 2.1.4 BC enabled looks the best 8)

In my opinion, 2.1.4 BC disabled is not bad at 100%, for example the gdm login screen fonts looks better than 2.1.3-r2. May be applying the ft_smooth hack (when available) could make results better :roll:
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puntium
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 10:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
So does the freetype team suggest to enable and disable the bytecode interpreter at the same time?


If you look at the release notes from freetype.org, the freetype team actually recommends that people now use the autohinter instead of the bci. I think people who work on freetype are much more wary of patent issues than the general desktop public (who just care that their fonts look nice).

The reason why it is still enabled for "cjk" is that some Asian fonts actually somehow cleverly use the bci to generate the shapes for symbols (sorry I don't know the details.. hopefully that was a vague enough description to not be wrong)

Also, Arial, happens to require several features of the BCI for it to be able to be rendered "correctly".

I guess if you're willing to take the risk in defying a software patent, then you can go ahead and turn the BCI on.. it seems to me the autohinter will always sort of be a "black magic" solution. Seems like it tries to automatically reverse engineer how a font was "supposed" to look, when the bytecode hints explicitly record how its supposed to look.

With the case of cjk though, you don't even get correct characters for some fonts, which is far greater of a problem. (though there was some mention on the freetype mailing list about a interpreter that avoids the patents..)

Lets just hope someone doesn't patent sorting. ;-P
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Gnufsh
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 12:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

For some reason, having the BCI on makes about 1/3 of my fonts either exceedingly ugly or simply unreadable. I'm glad it's off, before I had to edit the ebuild. For some reason, this new freetype isn't using smooth... But it does look a little better than the last one.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 12:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Allright i emerged freetype, with bci disabled which i understand is by default. Now how do i enable bci in the freetype ebuild? I want to compare the results.
Thanks
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piquadrat
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 12:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

my fonts look so much better without BCI! Some sites with dark background and light text where a pain in the a.., mhm, eyes to read and now it looks really beautiful!
BTW: I use a IBM ThinkPad TFT
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 1:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

how do we enable bci, again please?
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