Re: [Devel] Help me understand this... I'm loosing my sanity. Please.

[James H. Cloos Jr.]

>>>>> "Jeroen" == Jeroen Coumans <address@hidden> writes:

Jeroen> Perhaps you should disable this since (as previously
Jeroen> mentioned) the autohinter actually produces _better_ results
Jeroen> when using anti-aliased fonts.

This is very font-dependent.  The problem is not that the auto hinter
is better than the byte-code interpreter, but that several oft-used
fonts are poorly instructed.  Luxi's instructing -- auto-generated as
I recall -- is not as good as hand-tuned fonts.

If you have a recent version of Sun's jre or jdk installed, test the
fonts that came with it, in .../jre/lib/fonts/.  Those display much
better in some apps than the Luxi fonts.  (Note that except for the
glyph widths, the lucida and luxi fonts are based on the same
outlines.)  Even those have problems in some environments, though.
Mozilla using its own freetype engine does not do as well with them
as it does when using fontconfig/xft2.  Gnome-font-viewer shows the
same anomaly at certain point sizes.

In short, the best results are font dependent, and as such ought to
be settable per font in the fonts.conf files.

-JimC