Re: [ft-devel] Re: [Fontconfig] Why did the default font settings change around freetype 2.3 release and why isn't there at least a simple "no blurry fonts" settings?

[David Turner]

Hello Maarten,

On Thu, 17 May 2007 11:00:46 +0200, "Maarten Maathuis" <address@hidden> said:
> I do have one small question, why is the autohinter so ugly? (Is this on
> purpose?)
> 

Of course, it *is* on purpose. You see, we at the FreeType Team, we take pride 
in
producing *only* the ugliest and most disgusting text rendering we can get. Our 
motto
is, after all, "Proudly making users vomit since 1996 !" :o)

More seriously, the auto-hinter produces text that is a lot closer to the 
original
character shapes than anything you'll get from a highly tuned bytecoded 
TrueType font.

What I mean is that what you consider "good" text here is a highly distorted 
version
of the original font; it's more similar to a hand-coded bitmap than anything 
else and
there is no way that the auto-hinter can match this kind of work with the small 
CPU
and memory resources it can use.

And personally, I'm pretty tired of bytecoded text rendering. I find it a lot 
more ugly
than the auto-hinter's output. that's not to say that the latter can't be 
improved but
your mileage may vary.

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


> Maarten.
> 
> On 5/17/07, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > Here are some screenshots, were the bad.jpg is a good approximation
> > > of the original situation.
> >
> > Please try ftview and/or ftdiff on this particular font.
> >
> > > > > Am i again asking the wrong mailinglist?
> > > >
> > > > Yes, your question really belongs to freetype list.
> >
> > Not necessarily.
> >
> > > > I don't know why Werner sent you this way.  Probably because he
> > > > saw the XML snippets in your mail and automatically thought you
> > > > have a fontconfig question.
> >
> > :-) Indeed.  I need a way to reproduce a problem in a generic way, and
> > even the before/after snapshot doesn't really help, except that the
> > `good' one looks like having bytecode hinting enabled and the `bad'
> > one disabled.
> >
> >
> >     Werner
> >