[ft-devel] LIGHT hinting enhancement back-ported to FreeType 2.1.10

[Turner, David]

Hello,

to help people test the new LIGHT hinting mode, I've
back-ported my recent patch to FreeType 2.1.10. The patch
should work on 2.1.9 and mayber 2.1.8 as well. All you
need to test it on your desktop is:

 - get a fresh copy of the 2.1.10 sources, e.g.:

      
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.bz2

 - apply the patch, e.g.:

      tar xjf freetype-2.1.10.tar.bz2
      cd freetype-2.1.10.tar.bz2
      patch -p0 < freetype2110-light-hinting.patch

 - configure, build and install, as usual

      ./configure && make && make install

 - choose "light" hinting in your font properties dialog
   (either KDE or Gnome).


Note that I don't guarantee that this will work on any Linux
distributions, because how text is really rendered on a given
application depends on a *lot* of details (i.e. which toolkit,
which version of the toolkit, using Cairo or not, which version
of libXft, and much more).

As an example:

  - on my RHEL station at work, the grayscale hinting mode seems
    to be stuck to "light", whatever the hinting mode preference
    being applied. but this isn't so bad after all, but prevents
    you from easily comparing with the "normal" mode

  - on my Ubuntu station, "light"/"full" work as advertized,
    except when RGBA rendering mode is chosen, in which case
    rendering always reverts to full hinting

I expect ever stranger things on other distros. At least, you
have the option to test it.

Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)
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freetype2110-light-hinting.patch
Description: freetype2110-light-hinting.patch