[HOWTO]New freetype subpixel font rendering for lcd monitors

Message

IvanMajhen · Post by **IvanMajhen** » Thu Feb 08, 2007 8:23 pm

My fonts looks great now!
But I have problem with openoffice. They doesn't look like in kde or gtk. Like they aren't fully hinted or something.
I have checked use system fonts in options --> view, but they don't look like they should.
Openoffice is compiled, with binary looked even worse.
Is there any patch for ooffice?
http://shrani.si/files/snapshot2sw56.png

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Thu Feb 08, 2007 8:28 pm

Yeah, OpenOffice looks pretty bad compared to what can be done with this new freetype rendering mode. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any patch to remedy that.

vicaya · Post by **vicaya** » Thu Feb 08, 2007 9:52 pm

freetype 2.2.1-r1 got unmasked in portage, accidentally upgraded. Disatrous results in kde, the arial font is badly rendered, smaller, blurrier, fatter, so does bitstream vera sans mono. Just awful. Looks fine in firefox-bin (probably different set of libs)

reverting back to 2.1.10-r2 solved the font problems.

Phenax · Post by **Phenax** » Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:08 pm

2.3.1 is out in ~amd64, it looks a bit better than the previous 2.2* version.

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:35 pm

I'm a bit puzzled about last two posts. Were they merged from another topic? They don't fit here at all

BTW You can use freetype-2.3.1 from portage with this guide as well. Just remember not to enable bindist useflag and you are all set (you will still need cairo and libXft from overlay though).

indanet · Post by **indanet** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 1:27 pm

Hi!

I want to use freetype 2.3.1 from portage. Is there a better way than putting "=media-libs/freetype-2.3.1" in portage.keywords? The next time freetype is upgraded in portage and freetype-2.3.1 is removed, it will try to downgrade to the then stable version. If I put "media-libs/freetype" in portage.keywords, portage will always install the overlay's latest freetype version...

I need a way to say "unmask this package only for the portage repository".

Regards
indanet

EDIT: Fixed typos which made the whole post useless, thanks Paul!

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 1:35 pm

indanet wrote:portage will always install the overlay's latest freetype version

You're getting = and >= confused.

m.s.w · Post by **m.s.w** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 10:56 am

I tell you what. It seems that all the things you are talking here is totally dependent on what is "good" or "bad" for individual person.
I have tested all possible combinations (filter_default, *_legacy *_light X hintmedium, *full, *slight) and all of this sucks a lot.
The best fonts I have are with freetype-2.1. The color (how much black black color is), the bold fonts (bold is bold, not totally bold, and regular is regular not bold as it is with some fonts), the hinting (no blue colors on the edge of some fonts, on webpages, for example the best test was documentation for fontconfig in html format that we all have in /usr/share/doc/fontconfig-**/html), the spacing of the letters (the freetype makes lots of fonts to have too big letter spacing.)
So in my opinion, freetype-2.1 is great. The two next versions sucks.

Best Regards,
m.s.w

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 11:27 am

Here is my version. Could you please post yours?

m.s.w · Post by **m.s.w** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 2:57 pm

http://mkm-online.homelinux.org/linux/f ... ntfull.jpg

To jest najlepszy widok ze wszystkich przetestowanych.
freetype-2.1
hintfull

EDIT: Sorry about the language. It was not intentional

Translation:
This is the best look among all tested.

Pozdrawiam,
m.s.w

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 3:34 pm

https://boniek.homelinux.org/~boniek/de ... s-conf.png

Font size simialiar to yours. Bold fonts are bit bolder, spacing seems the same. IMO it looks really good (well bold fonts are too bold obviously, but it doesn't concern me as much). I like your screenshot too. It's different but nice nonetheless. Use whatever suits your taste

PS. please write in english - this is english forum.

m.s.w · Post by **m.s.w** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 4:02 pm

OK, I have to agree, that your screen is better. But the problem is that I culdn't get my fonts look like your screens shows. So obviously there has to be something that this mini HOWTO doesn't cover, but is cuicial for the fonts to work good.
I don't know what is it. In the mean time - as you said - I use whatever suits best.

Regards,
m.s.w

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 9:09 pm

I have just simplified guide as much as possible (well at least I think so

). I corrected .fonts.conf - it was WRONG before. We have to set autohinting to FALSE to use BCI (and we want to use it

). For people that couldn't get it to work - please try new guide and report back any problems.

Bartmanw · Post by **Bartmanw** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 4:06 pm

After a recent re-emerge of many packages (such as upgrade to Xorg 7), my fonts were not anti-aliased. I applied this guide, and then the fonts were good only in some applications, in particular the KDE ones. This is a screenshot of Firefox (left) and Konqueror (right). As you can see, the fonts in Firefox are not anti-aliased at all. Any idea what causes this difference? Are there any other packages which I should re-emerge apart from the 3 mentioned?

http://cage.ugent.be/~jdemeyer/badfonts.png

albright · Post by **albright** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 4:26 pm

As you can see, the fonts in Firefox are not anti-aliased at all

To be honest, I think your problem is with your font settings in
firefox preferences. Tell it to use bitstream vera sans and tell firefox
*not* to let web pages choose their own fonts. That worked for
me anyway.

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 4:27 pm

Try forcing fonts in firefox to something else (Edit/Preferences/Content/Advanced/Fonts for Western/) e.g. serif/Verdana/Verdana/Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts". See if that helps.

EDIT: albright was faster

Bartmanw · Post by **Bartmanw** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 11:23 pm

albright wrote:To be honest, I think your problem is with your font settings in
firefox preferences. Tell it to use bitstream vera sans and tell firefox
*not* to let web pages choose their own fonts. That worked for
me anyway.

I tried that, but that didn't fix it. The font changed, but it's still aliased. By the way, the bad fonts are not just in firefox. They are basically like that in every application except for the KDE ones (in KDE the fonts *do* look very good indeed).

Note that some packages on my system might be outdated, so it could very well be that I have to update a particular package. I would just like to avoid "emerge -uD world" unless necessary.

Bartmanw · Post by **Bartmanw** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 3:06 pm

While playing around and trying some things, I discovered the pango-view program. I displayed the text "Hello World" with 4 different backends. This is the result:

http://cage.ugent.be/~jdemeyer/pango-view.png

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 9:29 pm

Your screenshot should look like [this] - xft and cairo should look identical. Please post result of running following command:

Code: Select all

emerge -pv x11-libs/cairo x11-libs/libXft media-libs/freetype

devsk · Post by **devsk** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 10:37 pm

is it possible to set a system wide backend? I am seeing colored characters in my firefox text and pango-view text if I use xft backend. The cairo backend is the sharpest and that's what I want to use. How do I do that?

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 11:44 pm

Again xft and cairo should look identical as provided in screenshot in my previous post. They should look identical if both cairo and libXft were emerged with newspr use flag. Unfortunately it is not possible to set system wide backend (it all depends on a way application was coded). Closest to what you have in mind is to use DE such as Gnome and only use apps that are written using libs provided by that particular DE.

kamracik · Post by **kamracik** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 12:30 am

what should i write when layman ask me for a user and password??

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 2:37 am

Currently xeffects overlay is unavailable. Please be patient.

m.s.w · Post by **m.s.w** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 10:23 am

boniek wrote: We have to set autohinting to FALSE to use BCI (and we want to use it ). For people that couldn't get it to work - please try new guide and report back any problems.

OK, That was it - autohint=false.
And now, everything is nice.

Thank you.
m.s.w

Bartmanw · Post by **Bartmanw** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 11:05 am

boniek wrote:Your screenshot should look like [this] - xft and cairo should look identical. Please post result of running following command:
Code: Select all
emerge -pv x11-libs/cairo x11-libs/libXft media-libs/freetype

Here it is:

Code: Select all

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/cairo-1.3.12  USE="X newspr -debug -directfb -doc -glitz -svg -xcb" 0 kB [1]
[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXft-2.1.12  USE="newspr -debug" 0 kB [1]
[ebuild   R   ] media-libs/freetype-2.3.1_p20070207  USE="filter_default zlib -bindist -demos -doc -filter_legacy -filter_light" 0 kB [1]

Total: 3 packages (3 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 0 kB
Portage overlays:
 [1] /usr/portage/local/layman/xeffects

[HOWTO]New freetype subpixel font rendering for lcd monitors

This all freetype stuff

Only in KDE?

pango-view