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

[Maurizio Colucci]

> As to Maurizio: Yes, I understand your concern, but please do read
> through some of the bug reports in http://bugs.debian.org/libfreetype6
> and note these:
>
>   * Font rendering aesthetics is a very _subjective_ thing. Different
>     people have widely different perceptions, as you can tell after
>     reading through some of the bug reports.  For example, some LOVE
>     anti-aliased fonts.  Some HATE it and want nothing but pure black and
>     white.  Some complain Debian become unusable when MingLiU becomes
>     garbled strokes instead of proper Chinese characters.  

I have always wandered why Windows XP starts with Cleartype
disabled. Maybe you are right about that.

> So you see, your opinion is just one among many.  No need to lose
> your sanity.

Actually, I was loosing my sanity trying to _understand_ the source of
the problem. I have no big problem with your policy of enabling the
bytecodes, as long as it doesn't prevent to use the autohinter if you
like to. It's just that I didn't know that.

-----
Only, if I may:

I believe it is too difficult for an ordinary user to turn the
autohinter on. The only way I found is to recompile and substitute the
library. You mentioned there is another way, without recompiling,
maybe tweaking fonts.conf, but I could not understand how. ANd
whatever be that way, it is still too difficult :-).

One idea: I have noticed that

  dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

asks you if you want to enable subpixel hinting. Which is

  1.  useless, because you can do that in kde;

  2.  misleading: you end up wondering what is the difference between
      doing that in KDE or in fonts.conf.

On the other hand, dpkg-reconfigure does NOT ask you if you want to
use the autohinter, which would be much more important IMO. 

I don't know if it is feasible though, because in case you decide to
turn off the bytecode interpreter, fontconfig should not ask you. How
would it know? Maybe you could intergrate the two packages.

>   * It is a bug of the Luxi fonts, not FreeType, with the bytecode
>     interpreter on or off.  You can choose some other fonts.  The
>     ones in ttf-freefont are quite good.  I have quite often avoided
>     the Luxi fonts for the same reason.

Of course, now that I know I have no problems with that. But when I
didn't know,I was simply scared. I mean, I was scared I could never
have that quality in Debian for patent problems. It was just the
opposite, but I hand't understood that.

>   * I have been doing frequent uploads to keep Debian's libfreetype6
>     package update precisely I do care about font rendering issues.  I
>     just haven't gotten around to deal with yours yet (no one has
>     complained about the Luxi fonts + bytecode interpreter as loudly as
>     you have), but I'll deal with it eventually.  If you like, feel
>     free to file a bug report against libfreetype6.


It doesn't seem appropriate to me...

>  Just don't set it to severity: grave/serious, or I'll downgrade it
>  to the lowest severity.  


> As I said, the fuzziness problem has been dealt with in 2.1.4 (the
> issue was real when I tried it with David Chester's very first xfthack
> patch a year ago, but the rendering quality has gotten lot better since
> then, thanks to both David C. and David T. and others), so I don't mind
> turning off the bytecode interpreter again and "test" the water.
> Also, with the help with other experts on the list, and with upcoming
> configuration enhancements in FreeType 2 and fontconfig,

Will there be easy configuration facilities (such as the above
suggestion to improve dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig)?

I mean: I have nothing against writing a text file for configuring
things, on the contrary, I prefer to do so. But the user manual at
fontconfig.org

http://fontconfig.org/fontconfig-user.html

is obscure for me. I couldn't understand where and how to set the
autohint property to true. And whether I can to that for all fonts.


Thanks for your help!

Maurizio