fontconfig-ultimate - improve font rendering without hassle

Message

fau · Post by **fau** » Sat May 09, 2015 11:23 am

kernelOfTruth: Thanks. I think we made a good use of your LINGUAS suggestion

It's in the main portage tree and some new fonts too - Signika (fantasy/Comic Sans), Courier Prime (Courier New) and TeX Gyre (cursive/others)!
Basically, as described here, we've got full base, partial extended set coverate and almost all non-latin fonts from extended-extra.

The package you want to add to your world set is media-fonts/infinality-ultimate-meta now.
If you've got any problems with config protection while updating use CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/fonts/" env var.

Here are screenshots (with all LINGUAS enabled, which I strongly do NOT recommend. You are gonna get most scripts covered by noto fonts anyway). I've been using it for a week or so and there are noticeable improvements over previous version.
http://postimg.org/gallery/wwci2312/

I'm gonna add a wiki entry soon. Again thanks to yngwin who let me proxy maintain it and helped with updating ebuild.

PS This topic doesn't belong to "Unsupported Software" anymore.

The Main Man · Post by **The Main Man** » Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:17 am

Thanks for the package, really makes a difference.

How's Wiki going, is it up yet ?

yagami · Post by **yagami** » Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:18 am

Hi,

Updated your package to lastest release from bohoomil. Just did a release bump

link : https://github.com/alexjp/ajpmods/tree/ ... g-ultimate

mrpdaemon · Post by **mrpdaemon** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 4:57 am

Does this still work with freetype 2.6.5 ? I'm getting pretty bad font rendering with infinality-ultimate on freetype-2.6.5 (but everything looks great on freetype 2.6.3).

yagami · Post by **yagami** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 9:12 am

mrpdaemon wrote:Does this still work with freetype 2.6.5 ? I'm getting pretty bad font rendering with infinality-ultimate on freetype-2.6.5 (but everything looks great on freetype 2.6.3).

Well, at least my package, no. I am currently using 2.6.5 with USE="cleartype_hinting -infinality"

The Main Man · Post by **The Main Man** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 12:51 pm

In my case I masked freetype 2.6.5 and I'm using fontconfig-ultimate-9999.ebuild
Looks better than with freetype 2.6.5

I dunno, interesting situation... bohoomil seems to be MIA since freetype 2.6.5 came out, some say there's no reason at all to run infinality now since it's included in freetype 2.6.5, but some disagree.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Thu Sep 15, 2016 1:13 pm

So today, there is no recommendation for fontconfig-infinality anymore? And infinality-ultimate-meta, as infinality is part of freetype 2.6.5 when USE="infinality" is enabled? Why do you have USE="cleartype_hinting -infinality"?

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Thu Sep 15, 2016 3:53 pm

Newer freetype hinting improvements have rendered infinality obsolete. The built in code is also much faster.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Fri Sep 16, 2016 6:13 am

Sounds good. Though this information has not arrived in https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Infinality yet.

But then we need to summarize what setup is required to use that, differing from the initial howto text.
Before there was eselect fontconfig with 52-infinality.conf only, and eselect infinality and eselect lcdfilter.
Without infinality all the 52-infinality.conf and eselect infinality don't exist anymore. Should I just go back to enable just one single favourite font in eselect fontconfig? What does that actually do? Fonts not enabled there are just not available to desktop environments?

Then which USE flags for freetype are recommended? Only "cleartype_hinting" and disabled "-infinality" as infinality is obsolete?

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Fri Sep 16, 2016 7:06 am

After reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality was told by people on #archlinux that infinality today just ships a set of configurations, that can still be useful. I'm confused. So following out initial howto would that make use of the faster code in latest freetype?

Update: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/f ... 00091.html

After reading that, is my guess correct, that USE="cleartype_hinting" is the new v40, while USE="infinality" is the older v38? While the can only be enabled XOR?

The Main Man · Post by **The Main Man** » Fri Sep 16, 2016 5:53 pm

I switched today from infinality to clear type hinting, can't say it's better, it's not worse either, but it's different and I think I like it more !

@Massimo B. , I'm not sure but I think that fonts which are enabled with eselect fontconfig will use font hinting.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Wed Sep 21, 2016 8:47 am

I have to admit, after switching to clear type, the hinting is more sharp but has more edges, looking like MS Windows. The infinality was very smooth, but a bit blurry. Can't tell for now which I prefer. But switching seems to be harder as it requires a new compilation and X restart.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Thu Sep 29, 2016 7:59 am

Hi, I switched back to the guide of this thread, emerged freetype with USE="infinality -cleartype_hinting" :

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# eselect infinality show ; eselect lcdfilter show
Current style symlink:
  /etc/fonts/infinality/styles.conf.avail/ultimate-free
Current lcdfilter style symlink:
  /usr/share/eselect-lcdfilter/env.d/ultimate

I prefer that hinting more than cleartype. Looks quite sharp, but the only con is that some characters like ']' in some small sizes have coloured edges that I can't get fixed changing the subpixel type:
https://picload.org/image/rddoacla/hinting.png

As for the performance I have not idea where an impact could be noticed.

About firefox: There seems to be no USE="system-cairo" anymore today but I see Firefox already using the set hinting after restart.

papu · Post by **papu** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:50 pm

i have changed from media-libs/fontconfig-ultimate to media-libs/freetype-2.7-r2 but i didn't save my default fontconfig.
somebody can paste your default eselect fontconfig list? this is mine and don't know if is possible to getting it better...

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eselect fontconfig list
Available fontconfig .conf files (* is enabled):
  [1]   10-autohint.conf
  [2]   10-hinting-full.conf
  [3]   10-hinting-medium.conf
  [4]   10-hinting-none.conf
  [5]   10-hinting-slight.conf
  [6]   10-no-sub-pixel.conf
  [7]   10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf *
  [8]   10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf
  [9]   10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf *
  [10]  10-sub-pixel-vbgr.conf
  [11]  10-sub-pixel-vrgb.conf
  [12]  10-unhinted.conf
  [13]  11-lcdfilter-default.conf *
  [14]  11-lcdfilter-legacy.conf
  [15]  11-lcdfilter-light.conf
  [16]  20-unhint-small-vera.conf *
  [17]  25-unhint-nonlatin.conf
  [18]  30-metric-aliases.conf *
  [19]  30-urw-aliases.conf *
  [20]  40-nonlatin.conf
  [21]  45-latin.conf *
  [22]  49-sansserif.conf *
  [23]  50-user.conf *
  [24]  51-local.conf *
  [25]  60-latin.conf *
  [26]  60-liberation.conf
  [27]  65-fonts-persian.conf *
  [28]  65-khmer.conf
  [29]  65-nonlatin.conf *
  [30]  69-unifont.conf *
  [31]  70-no-bitmaps.conf
  [32]  70-yes-bitmaps.conf *
  [33]  80-delicious.conf *
  [34]  90-roboto-regular.conf *
  [35]  90-synthetic.conf *
  [36]  99pdftoopvp.conf

What are the benefits of harfbuzz support?
https://i.imgur.com/hv7IwOg.png

Code: Select all

Portage 2.3.3 (python 3.4.5-final-0, default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/plasma, gcc-5.4.0, glibc-2.23-r3, 4.8.12-gentoo-r1 x86_64)
=================================================================
System uname: Linux-4.8.12-gentoo-r1-x86_64-Intel-R-_Core-TM-_i5-6600_CPU_@_3.30GHz-with-gentoo-2.3
KiB Mem:    16360352 total,   9504440 free
KiB Swap:   17301500 total,  17301500 free

ld GNU ld (Gentoo 2.27 p1.0) 2.27
app-shells/bash:          4.4_p5-r1::gentoo
dev-java/java-config:     2.2.0-r3::gentoo
dev-lang/perl:            5.24.1_rc4::gentoo
dev-lang/python:          2.7.12::gentoo, 3.4.5::gentoo
dev-util/cmake:           3.7.1::gentoo
dev-util/pkgconfig:       0.29.1::gentoo
sys-apps/baselayout:      2.3::gentoo
sys-apps/openrc:          0.22.4::gentoo
sys-apps/sandbox:         2.10-r2::gentoo
sys-devel/autoconf:       2.13::gentoo, 2.69-r2::gentoo
sys-devel/automake:       1.13.4-r1::gentoo, 1.14.1-r1::gentoo, 1.15-r2::gentoo
sys-devel/binutils:       2.27::gentoo
sys-devel/gcc:            4.9.3::gentoo, 5.4.0::gentoo
sys-devel/gcc-config:     1.8-r1::gentoo
sys-devel/libtool:        2.4.6-r2::gentoo
sys-devel/make:           4.2.1::gentoo
sys-kernel/linux-headers: 4.8::gentoo (virtual/os-headers)
sys-libs/glibc:           2.23-r3::gentoo

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64 ~amd64"

L10N="ca"
LANG="ca_ES.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="ca"

thanks you!

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Tue Mar 13, 2018 3:13 pm

Is media-fonts/infinality-ultimate-meta still working?
We got [bug=650248]bug 650248: media-libs/fontconfig-2.13.0: fonts are too small and ugly when using media-fonts/infinality-ultimate-meta[/bug]
Then there are already quite complex guides to replace infinality: cryzed/fix-infinality.md
I'm a bit lost. After downgrading fontconfig I got the correct font for Palemoon/Firefox again, but fonts in other Gtk applications like Evoltuion are still broken (tiny and serif).

Post by **Juippisi** » Wed Mar 14, 2018 10:24 am

Well, this is a matter of taste I believe more than anything. In my opinion in that bug report the "ugly fonts" picture is a lot better than the "nice fonts" one. Letterspacing is more even and to me its easier to read the text.

However I do agree that something changed when updating fontconfig from 2.12.6 to 2.13.0. For me, the 'serif' type of text became unreadable. Everything else pretty much looked the same. So yea, I think it's time to get rid of infinality going forward. I gotta say, I always thought infinality patches were merged to upstream freetype anyway a long time ago, but maybe thats not the case then.

Following your link, https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e705 ... 9e748c5671 it wasnt that complicated to get rid of infinality.

First I 'forked' media-fonts/infinality-ultimate-meta to my local overlay and removed the dependency for media-libs/fontconfig-ultimate because that pulls a package that depends on freetype[infinality]. I wanted to keep infinality-ultimate-meta installed because it installs so many fonts needed to browse the web these days.

Code: Select all

--- /usr/portage/media-fonts/infinality-ultimate-meta/infinality-ultimate-meta-1.ebuild	2018-03-10 09:08:28.185702243 +0200
+++ ./infinality-ultimate-meta-1-r1.ebuild	2018-03-14 10:43:24.817087715 +0200
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 done
 unset lang LANGS
 
-RDEPEND="media-libs/fontconfig-ultimate
+RDEPEND="
 	free? (
 		media-fonts/noto
 		media-fonts/heuristica

and removed 'infinality' use flag from my make.conf and removed this line from package.use

media-libs/freetype -cleartype_hinting infinality

ran emerge -ND world and --depclean -a after.

Then I enabled the settings mentioned in your guide with eselect fontconfig enable

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10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf *
11-lcdfilter-default.conf *
51-local.conf *

make sure infinality.conf isnt in your list anymore, and if it is, disable it. Then edit /etc/fonts/local.conf with the file included in that guide ( https://gist.github.com/cryzed/4f64bb79 ... 18ba2d32fc with the updated lines below in that link )

Relog to X session and fonts look good with fontconfig-2.13.0. Especially the face with serif-type fonts has gotten better. However I do think adding that local.conf does miracles even with infinality enabled.

However as they say in that guide, its better to migrate away now because sooner or later everyone will have to.