Re: [ft-devel] Something in 2.6.4 broke my windows fonts

[Nikolaus Waxweiler]

> Hi Nikolaus!

Hi! I've been expecting you :)

> I am one of those weird "windows fonts on unix" users. Yeah minority I know,
> but recent update completely blew up my setup. So sorry for mailing you out of
> blue!

I think everyone with Wine installed has Microsoft's fonts :)

> I don't care about ClearType in the slightest, I would just like my Tahoma and
> Arial to be pixel perfect crispy as I am used to.
>
> I would also like to push for this to be solved at upstream, as I am
> certainly not the only one who is having these problems.
>
> At least some fontconfig option, I can manually define for these few fonts I
> depend on, would be helpful.

I don't know of any other way than recompiling. Fontconfig doesn't 
support the property and likely won't as it isn't a font-property but 
something that affects all TrueType fonts. Cairo/Qt would need to go 
along with it, too.

I don't know of a clean way to handle this in FreeType and I frankly 
have little interest in bringing the "old" look back to the foreground 
as I'm more of a DirectWrite/ClearType person :)

If you really want the pixel look back, your best chance might be 
http://bohoomil.com/. That's a patchset on top of FreeType and 
fontconfig that aims for configurability. It comes with a pixely Windows 
XP preset iirc.

> I tried to dig out info on mailing lists, but it is all really complex.
> However there was whitelisting proposed for these specific fonts.
> Can that be implemented and used to solve the problem?

Whitelist? Where? Keep in mind that FreeType is not the place for 
configuration and white/blacklists unless it's critical for rendering 
things correctly.