Linked by AdamW on Tue 23rd Aug 2011 22:10 UTC
Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page.
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RE[3]: Ugly Font Rendering
by gilboa on Wed 24th Aug 2011 16:29
in reply to "RE[2]: Ugly Font Rendering"
Member since:2005-07-06
Well, what that does is disable the bytecode interpreter and use autohinting only. It's a wonderful example of the subjectivity of font rendering, in fact. Here's the history.
Adam,
Being a long time Fedora user, I'm well aware of byte-code/auto-hinter story.
However, not sure if its DPI related or nVidia card related, when I hit this issue (as I said, I only faced this issue on ~50% of my Fedora 15 machines) there was nothing subjective about the fonts being incorrectly rendered.
E.g. On the machines that exhibit this issue, the vertical line in "L" in certain sizes is simply aliased out making L look like it underscore ("_").
Sadly enough, as I saw multiple posts about this issue back when I started using F15, I didn't file a bug report coupled with pictures.
I'm in the process of converting large number of F14 machines to F15; if one of them triggers this bug, I'll file a bug report w/ pictures.
- Gilboa
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Well, what that does is disable the bytecode interpreter and use autohinting only. It's a wonderful example of the subjectivity of font rendering, in fact. Here's the history.
The freetype autohinter is a workaround for the fact that bytecode interpretation (reading special instructions that come with a font which tell you how to hint it, essentially) was patented. Fedora is serious about known patents, so Fedora prior to F15 disabled freetype's bytecode interpreter and used autohinting only.
One of the #1 'fix Fedora's ugly font rendering' "tips" for Fedora 14 and earlier was to install a modified freetype package which enabled the bytecode interpreter.
Since F15 the patent on the bytecode interpreter is dead, so Fedora's freetype ships with the bytecode interpreter enabled. Autohinting is only used for fonts which don't have a bytecode. Now, one of the #1 'fix Fedora's ugly font rendering' "tips" is how to configure freetype to use the autohinter all the time - i.e. the precise opposite of the old "tip".
Need any more proof that this is an utterly subjective area?