[HOWTO]New freetype subpixel font rendering for lcd monitors

Message

ubercow · Post by **ubercow** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 3:08 pm

yabbadabbadont wrote:
briancl wrote:
Turingtest wrote: Also, @briancl, the stylesheet for the gentoo forums specifies courier as the monospace font for code blocks. If you want only bitstream vera to be used untick the "allow pages to use their own fonts" box in the preferences dialog.
I'd prefer to let websites use their own font, so how do I make the courier font that is used look good? If you look closely at the screenshot, the 3rd and 4th line down in the first code block start with "-W" or "-We" and those particular characters are very poorly rendered compared to the rest of the characters. How do I make this more consistent?
If you don't already, try disabling bit-mapped fonts.

He has disabled bitmap fonts, and that is why the browser is trying to render Bitstream Vera Mono instead of Courier, because Courier is a bitmap font. So that is supposed to be Bitstream Vera Mono in that screenshot, and it therefore should look the same as in the terminal, which it does not. I don't know why it doesn't though, have you tried disabling bitmap fonts without the lcd filter? (set lcdlegacy to see) Does it look equally bad?

briancl · Post by **briancl** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 3:54 pm

ubercow wrote:
He has disabled bitmap fonts, and that is why the browser is trying to render Bitstream Vera Mono instead of Courier, because Courier is a bitmap font. So that is supposed to be Bitstream Vera Mono in that screenshot, and it therefore should look the same as in the terminal, which it does not. I don't know why it doesn't though, have you tried disabling bitmap fonts without the lcd filter? (set lcdlegacy to see) Does it look equally bad?

This is correct. If you look at my "eselect fontconfig list" output, I have enabled the "70-no-bitmaps.conf". If there is some other way that I should be disabling bitmap fonts, let me know. Also, I can try to disable bitmap fonts without the lcd filter, but I don't know how to do that. What do I need to do? Thanks.

Turingtest · Post by **Turingtest** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:15 pm

briancl wrote:
This is correct. If you look at my "eselect fontconfig list" output, I have enabled the "70-no-bitmaps.conf". If there is some other way that I should be disabling bitmap fonts, let me know. Also, I can try to disable bitmap fonts without the lcd filter, but I don't know how to do that. What do I need to do? Thanks.

If you run "fc-match Courier" the system should tell you what font it's rendering in place of the bitmap Courier font, compare the rendering in your browser to the rendering in some other program maybe, see exactly what the issue is. You can change the font that's being rendered in place of courier by messing around with the files in /etc/fonts/conf.avail also if you want.

briancl · Post by **briancl** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:46 pm

Turingtest wrote:
briancl wrote:
This is correct. If you look at my "eselect fontconfig list" output, I have enabled the "70-no-bitmaps.conf". If there is some other way that I should be disabling bitmap fonts, let me know. Also, I can try to disable bitmap fonts without the lcd filter, but I don't know how to do that. What do I need to do? Thanks.
If you run "fc-match Courier" the system should tell you what font it's rendering in place of the bitmap Courier font, compare the rendering in your browser to the rendering in some other program maybe, see exactly what the issue is. You can change the font that's being rendered in place of courier by messing around with the files in /etc/fonts/conf.avail also if you want.

fc-match Courier says I'm getting "Nimbus Mono L" in its place. How do I change that? I looked at /etc/fonts/conf.avail, and I see 30-metric-aliases.conf where Nimbus is bound to Courier. I suppose I should overwrite with a /etc/fonts/local.conf binding of my own? I tried a few different things, but nothing seems to work.. I still get Nimbus after each reboot.

Thanks.

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:46 pm

briancl wrote:fc-match Courier says I'm getting "Nimbus Mono L" in its place. How do I change that? I looked at /etc/fonts/conf.avail, and I see 30-metric-aliases.conf where Nimbus is bound to Courier. I suppose I should overwrite with a /etc/fonts/local.conf binding of my own? I tried a few different things, but nothing seems to work.. I still get Nimbus after each reboot.

Thanks.

I just changed it by adding the following to my ~/.fonts.conf file. I used the DejaVu fonts to replace Helvetica, Times, and Courier. You may want to use something else, and possibly only for Courier.

Code: Select all

  <alias binding="same">
    <family>Helvetica</family>
    <accept>
      <family>DejaVu Sans</family>
    </accept>
  </alias>
  <alias binding="same">
    <family>Times</family>
    <accept>
      <family>DejaVu Serif</family>
    </accept>
  </alias>
  <alias binding="same">
    <family>Courier</family>
    <accept>
      <family>DejaVu Sans Mono</family>
    </accept>
  </alias>

Edit: Woo Hoo! 4000th post.

By the way, here is what firefox looks like with these settings on my system: http://omploader.org/vazJp
Edit2: Pay no attention to the purple. It was a failed experiment at theme modification on my part.

mwhitlock · Post by **mwhitlock** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 4:43 am

bi3l wrote:Here it is: http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/misc/gent ... ng.tar.bz2

Very nice! I'd been using the ebuilds from gentoo-china, but the Cairo from there was very ugly: lots of color fringing. These ebuilds and patches from bi3l are perfect. I am now using all stock Portage ~amd64 except for the four ebuilds from bi3l here.

What's the hold-up getting this stuff put in the official Portage tree? Seems totally stable. And if they claim it's a legal issue, well so is the BCI hinter in freetype, but they don't seem to have a problem with that!

Now if only someone would implement fractional metrics in freetype. It's great that we can render glyphs with subpixel precision, but we should not be constrained to positioning them at whole-pixel boundaries!

Also, why the apparent lack of kerning in libXft? If you look at "AVAVA" in Corbel 12 pt. in a libXft-rendered program, it's much more spaced out than if you look at it in a Cairo-rendered program. I've also noticed that libXft doesn't do ligatures: compare "fi" in a libXft program versus in a Cairo program.

acevery · Post by **acevery** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:34 pm

bi3l wrote:Here it is: http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/misc/gent ... ng.tar.bz2

Very helpful, thanks!

bi3l · Post by **bi3l** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:27 am

I've updated the tarball with freetype-2.3.6-r1.

briancl · Post by **briancl** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 3:07 pm

bi3l wrote:I've updated the tarball with freetype-2.3.6-r1.

Thanks.. Changelog: http://packages.larrythecow.org/?v=ebui ... e-2.3.6-r1

Looks like a security fix and font scaling bugfix.

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:36 pm

briancl wrote:Looks like a security fix and font scaling bugfix.

The security fix was in 2.3.6, which is already marked stable. 2.3.6-r1 is just the the font scaling bugfix. Just FYI.

pmp11y · Post by **pmp11y** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 8:59 am

bi3l wrote:I've updated the tarball with freetype-2.3.6-r1.

There is old tarball!

bi3l · Post by **bi3l** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 5:13 pm

Updated

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 8:08 pm

bi3l wrote:Updated

What did you change compared to the previous one?

bi3l · Post by **bi3l** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 8:12 pm

I've updated fontconfig to 2.6.0-r2:

ChangeLog wrote:Purposefully dropped the xml USE flag and libxml2 support. Having this is silly since expat is the preferred way to go per upstream and libxml2 support simply exists as a fallback when expat isn't around. expat support is the main way to go and every other distro uses it. By using the xml USE flag to enable libxml2 support, this confuses users and results in most people getting the non-standard behavior of libxml2 usage since most profiles have USE=xml

AaronPPC · Post by **AaronPPC** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 9:46 pm

Thanks for your work bi3l! My text looks great again.

pmp11y · Post by **pmp11y** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:37 am

bi3l wrote:I've updated fontconfig to 2.6.0-r2:

There is not updated tarball. All files dated 14 Jun

bi3l · Post by **bi3l** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:47 am

pmp11y wrote:There is not updated tarball. All files dated 14 Jun

Are you sure, you downloaded the tarball again ?

mwhitlock · Post by **mwhitlock** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:55 am

pmp11y wrote:There is not updated tarball. All files dated 14 Jun

Maybe a transparent proxy caching the file? I downloaded it yesterday afternoon, and it does indeed have fontconfig-2.6.0-r2.ebuild, dated 2008-06-27.

swimmer · Post by **swimmer** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 4:38 pm

yabbadabbadont wrote:I have the following in my ~/.fonts.conf (on an x86, not amd64 system)

Code: Select all

/home/daffy $ cat .fonts.conf
<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
    <edit name="rgba"      mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
    <edit name="autohint"  mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
    <edit name="hinting"   mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
    <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
    <edit name="lcdfilter" mode="assign"><const>lcddefault</const></edit>
          <!-- lcdnone, lcddefault, lcdlight, lcdlegacy -->
  </match>
  <match target="font">
    <test name="weight" compare="more"><const>medium</const></test>
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
    <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
    <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintnone</const></edit>
  </match>
  <selectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
      </pattern>
    </rejectfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

Thank you very much yabbadabbadont!!! Your settings together with the tarball from bi3l (man thanks for that one as well!!!) my fonts look just stunning

I'm simply amazed how good it all looks now

JFYI
swimmer

peteblack · Post by **peteblack** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 2:20 am

Just downloaded and installed. Looks awesome! Thanks you, great job everyone involved.

pmp11y · Post by **pmp11y** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 8:23 am

bi3l wrote:
pmp11y wrote:There is not updated tarball. All files dated 14 Jun
Are you sure, you downloaded the tarball again ?

Sorry, it was proxy

It's ok now.

Thank you for this great job!

mwhitlock · Post by **mwhitlock** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:20 am

Need a 2.3.7. Thanks for the great work, bi3l!

bi3l · Post by **bi3l** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 5:11 am

mwhitlock wrote:Need a 2.3.7. Thanks for the great work, bi3l!

Done

xerxesmc · Post by **xerxesmc** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 8:33 am

thx for the config it looks stunning >>

grahamm · Post by **grahamm** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:00 pm

Do you know when this page will be on-line again?