[HOWTO]Freetype subpixel font rendering - lcd monitors Pt 2

pezed · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 31

Just wanted to say thanks for keeping the ubuntu patches alive. In my opinion they are far superior to the cleartype setup. Keep up the good work!! (Please!!)

unK · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2007 Posts: 769

If someone is using KDE and has problems with qt4 and openoffice not respecting fontconfig settings, here's the solution: go to Control Center -> Appereance & Themes -> Colors and disable option "Apply colors to non-KDE applications". That resolved the issue for me.
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ocin · Guru Joined: 01 Jan 2006 Posts: 500

just wanted to say that freetype-2.3.9 is in ::devnull now :)

manwe_ · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 1:48 pm Post subject:

Need a little help with configuration. Two things are looking ugly:
1. Courier font i Opera's [10alpha, shared qt3, amd64] <pre> : http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/4793/screenshot2009032414351.png
2. Java applications, JDownloader on screenshot: http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/3636/screenshot2009032414353.png . Looks the same with sun-jdk and icedtea6-bin.

mwhitlock · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:28 pm Post subject:

manwe_ · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:41 pm Post subject:

I do have sun-jdk-1.6.0, and it didn't look that crappy before. I wasn't using jdownloader for a while, but kept system up to date. Than few days ago runned it again and saw this. Something in the system has changed in those previous weeks, but few weeks is a hell lot of emerges so finding cause without any clues is impossible.

-- update:
Wine looks the same: http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/1672/screenshot2009032415444.png and also throws:

Evilguru · Guru Joined: 16 Aug 2005 Posts: 390 Location: England

There is a command line flag you can pass to Java to change the text AA methods. I can't remember it off hand, although it doesn't improve the rendering quality much.

Sun seem to care very little about platform integration when it comes to Swing -- which is why after 6 years it still looks poor. One day, however, they might start to use the system settings for AA and hinting, one day...

Regards, Freddie.

manwe_ · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:11 am Post subject:

OK, the hell with java and wine (for now), but what with Opera? It used to be fine, something has changed and now Courier font looks like this: http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/4793/screenshot2009032414351.png . It's not present in the system (/usr/share/fonts/, gtk-chtheme, qtconfig, openoffice writer) but somehow is available in Opera's font list as "Courier [bitstream]" and used when specified in CSS.

swimmer · Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 12:29 am Post subject:

Do you have 70-no-bitmaps.conf enabled & 70-yes-bitmaps.conf disabled?

manwe_ · Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 3:09 pm Post subject:

Hell-Razor · Guru Joined: 10 Jun 2004 Posts: 458

Hey guys, I have been looking through all these threads and have not been able to find a how-to to get this working. Could somebody please re-post it? looking through 37 pages of forums is kind of difficult.
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ocin · Guru Joined: 01 Jan 2006 Posts: 500

http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/better-lcd-font-rendering/
use this howto - but in addition note that you can choose between ubuntu and cleartype rendering.

ssmaxss · Posted: Wed May 06, 2009 1:33 pm Post subject:

there is freetype-2.3.9-r1 in portage that is newer than freetype-2.3.9 from devnull overlay, so it wants to install. Maybe someone would bump overlay version to 2.3.9-r1 too (afaik it should include some security fix)

ocin · Guru Joined: 01 Jan 2006 Posts: 500

ssmaxss · Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 5:41 pm Post subject:

Thanks!

overkll · Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 9:30 pm Post subject:

Didn't this start out with the lcd-filtering overley? Has lcd-filtering merged into the devnull overlay? Or are there now two overlays for fonts?

I ask since the lcd-filtering overley DOESN'T contain the new freetype-2.3.9-r1.

iamboredr · n00b Joined: 09 May 2009 Posts: 10

wow thanks alot it helps alot

bi3l · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 268 Location: France

overkll · Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 5:23 pm Post subject:

Thanks bi3l, or should I say merci beaucoup?

I just synced the lcd-filtering overlay and freetype-2.3.9-r1 has been added.

PinguinoLoco · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2009 Posts: 21

There is a post in the KDE forums of a person who has written patches to enable subpixel hinting in Okular. My experience in patching is limited and I can't get them to apply. Maybe some of the experts here could take a look at it. The screenshot the author of the patches provides looks great, I wish I could read PDF files like that!

bi3l · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 268 Location: France

There have been such patches for a while but they are all quite ugly because they don't respect any of the user settings: they hardcode slight subpixel hinting and rgb order.

bi3l · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 268 Location: France

I've added an ebuild for poppler-glib in the ldc-filtering overlay. With the hinting flag, it should provide hinting to the cairo backend according to your settings. PDF readers using poppler-glib (such as evince) should then have hinting enabled.

Please, let me know if it works.

PinguinoLoco · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2009 Posts: 21

Thanks bi3l, it worked fine for me. There is subpixel hinting in evince and changing the hinting style in .fonts.conf did change the appearance of the PDF. Works OK for me with slight hinting (letters are a bit heavier than with Adobe Reader, but I like them) and for other hinting styles there are artifacts in the rendering (wrong size of some letters).

Would it be very difficult to have a similar patch for poppler-qt4 and okular?

bi3l · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 268 Location: France

PinguinoLoco · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2009 Posts: 21

The patch in the KDE forums I posted above is supposed to do that, make okular use the cairo backend and hardcode slight hinting, but sadly I wasn't able to apply it.