[Devel] my experience with 2.1.4

[bulia byak]

as I understand it, what was once David Chester's "Xft hack" has been 
incorporated into Freetype 2.1.4. Is this correct? 

I've been using said "hack" for the last months and now tried to install 2.1.4. 
But the results are different. Freetype seems to do a lot of hinting, and not 
all of it is good. Some stems are thinner than others, positioning of stems is 
uneven, etc. It's especially bad for Cyrillic fonts (perhaps because your 
autohinting was designed for ASCII characters?)

So, is there a way that I can enable the same low level of hinting as in the 
original "hack"?

I like it when fonts are very smooth, almost as if they are rendered at 10x the 
resolution and then zoomed out in GIMP. This is what David's wonderful "hack" 
provided and what I'm unable to get from vanilla Freetype 2.1.4.

I tried to undefine FT_CONFIG_CHESTER_* defines in 
include/freetype/config/ftoption.h, one by one, but this did not help.

I then tried enabling the bytecode interpreter. Even more hinting! Admittedly 
it's more even than autohinting, but the letters look blocky and unnatural 
because there's not much of AA left. The font is almost completely "redrawn" to 
align to pixel boundaries. I don't like it. 

Note: the above is experience I get with KDE apps. I don't know why, but 
Mozilla with XFT enabled still gives me nice smooth even fonts, both with the 
"hacked" libfreetype and with Freetype 2.1.4. Perhaps it's statically linked to 
its own libfreetype?

To be precise, before installing Freetype 2.1.4 I had used libfreetype.so.6.3.2 
binary from David's site, dated Sep 22, 2002. I didn't try his version of Dec 
10; it may be different. So, my question is: can I force freetype 2.1.4 to do 
the same ratio of hinting and antialiasing as that David's version? If so, how?

Thanks in advance,

-- bb

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