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

[Martin \"eto\" Misuth]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2016 07:28:37 +0200
Nikolaus Waxweiler <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi! I've been expecting you :)

Heh!

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

Well I don't use Wine anymore, and I wanted to make clear enough that this is
"standalone X + toolkits + webfonts" setup. Maybe it affects other such "weird"
combinations in different ways?

Sorry for the poor wording. And for not being clear enough.

>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.

Strange thing about this is, that gtk2 program and qt5 program windows don't
explode, and such applications display fonts in window controls normally, but
Gecko engines and some things (yes, I am too lazy check again) do have problems,
indeed.

How come in some of these programs fonts work as expected and somewhere else
they break? Is this fontconfig related somehow, then? How?

I do also understand fontconfig is separate mechanism, and you are telling me
there is no way of this getting solved in "their domain", so to speak?

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

I was reffering to this email from Werner I found:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.fonts.freetype.devel/10497

And, well it breaks rendering to almost unreadable levels indeed. So I would
say it is kind of "critical".

Lower resolution displays and CRTs are still not the thing of the past yet. One
can hardly find higher quality fonts for situations like that, than those from
Microsoft (unfortunately, open source fonts will probably never reach that
state, now when everybody is jumping hires "retina" bandwagon). This might be
crucial for some users, and I believe they should not be left in the dark,
at least yet.

Webfonts package contains only handful of fonts and most new fonts being hires
LCD "optimized", whitelist could be an effective option.

On Thu, 07 Jul 2016 08:49:03 +0200 (CEST)
Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hmm.  I can imagine to have (optional) environment variable support in
> FreeType to provide default values for font driver properties, e.g.
> 
>   FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35 \
>                       cff:no-stem-darkening=1 \
>                       autofitter:warping=1

In my opinion this would be great solution (at least for users with "no desktop
environment" and "custom wm/no DE" setups). Such users are usually messing with
envvars anyway. It would be non invasive for most "normal" users whoever they
are, and would allow one to revert to old behaviour dynamically.

Though grepping for getenv() in freetype2 sources, it seems to me, only debug
freetype builds use environment variables at all. More over, all these variables
have 'FT2_' prefix.

Shouldn't thus envvar in question be named 'FT2_PROPERTIES'?

Thank you for consideration, and not dimissing this issue outright.

---

Also, completely unrelated to this:
  http://freetype.sourceforge.net/ 
shows different page than:
  https://www.freetype.org/

News there [http://freetype.sourceforge.net/] are stale too.
It would make sense to configure http://freetype.sourceforge.net/ to redirect
to https://www.freetype.org/ and consolidate everything into single resource,
as it makes information discovery quite confusing.

---

  eto