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PaulBredbury
Watchman
Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 7310
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 Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 7:38 pm Post subject: |
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Perhaps I'm mis-interpreting what hinting is.  In that case, hinting definitely makes the "10"s look better.
Ah well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The best way to make the fonts look better, I suppose, is to buy a higher-res monitor, to give the font engine more pixels (and sub-pixels) with which to render |
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southsider
Guru
Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 358
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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You are having a laugh!
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janice.jones3/pics/hinting%20comparison.png
This is the definitive answer. Bitstream Vera Sans at different sizes. Left is unhinted, right is hinted.
Notice how the hinted font is actually a different font at every size? Come on it looks ugly as sin!
Maybe I'm lucky to have a 96dpi TFT panel... |
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PaulBredbury
Watchman
Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 7310
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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| southsider wrote: | | Notice how the hinted font is actually a different font at every size? Come on it looks ugly as sin! |
That's a much better comparison - I see your point.
I wasn't disagreeing with you earlier, though. My Linux font rendering is, to my mind, much better than Windows' ClearType |
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southsider
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 358
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:57 pm Post subject: |
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[Edit]
Scrap that, false alarm. |
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southsider
Guru
Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 358
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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Rah! I've figured it out.
Now, fonts come with in-built hinting I think. This generally looks rubbish. However, use freetype's "autohinting" feature and it will look much better.
This may be what you need to check out. |
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widremann
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Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 1:33 am Post subject: |
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| southsider wrote: | Example local.conf file with Luxi defaults:
(mine forces RGB (subpixel) anti-aliasing and disables hinting systemwide here, the settings in Gnome/KDE don't do anything)
| Code: | <?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
<!--
Provide required aliases for standard names
-->
<alias>
<family>serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>Luxi Serif</family>
<family>Bitstream Vera Serif</family>
<family>Times New Roman</family>
<family>Nimbus Roman No9 L</family>
<family>Times</family>
<family>Kochi Mincho</family>
<family>AR PL SungtiL GB</family>
<family>AR PL Mingti2L Big5</family>
<family>Baekmuk Batang</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>Luxi Sans</family>
<family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
<family>Verdana</family>
<family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
<family>Arial</family>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<family>Kochi Gothic</family>
<family>AR PL KaitiM GB</family>
<family>AR PL KaitiM Big5</family>
<family>Baekmuk Dotum</family>
<family>SimSun</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>monospace</family>
<prefer>
<family>Luxi Mono</family>
<family>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</family>
<family>Andale Mono</family>
<family>Courier New</family>
<family>Nimbus Mono L</family>
<family>Kochi Gothic</family>
<family>AR PL KaitiM GB</family>
<family>Baekmuk Dotum</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
</fontconfig> |
Enjoy! |
Yes! That pretty much fixed it. Fedora still looks nicer (I happened to see somebody's LCD running Fedora the other day and the fonts were awesome). But this is certainly better, and more tolerable. |
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widremann
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Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 3:30 am Post subject: |
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Actually, on further comparison with the fonts on my tower (Gentoo also), the fonts are still subpar, mainly in Konsole. Some of the stems are still to thick and the letters are still too grainy.
What's interesting is the results I get with the following setup. I connect to my tower from my laptop using XDMCP. So, the X server is the one on my laptop, but the programs are all running on the tower. The fonts look fine. From that XDMCP session, I ssh -X into my laptop and start a Konsole session. So Konsole is running on my laptop, sending its display through an SSH tunnel to the tower, where it is further sent, via XDMCP back to my laptop. The fonts look fine. So, I am using the same X server and the same program, but I get different results? At one point, I made sure my /etc/fonts/local.conf on the laptop looked exactly the same as my /etc/fonts/local.conf on the tower. Even so, the fonts still look different. I'm really stumped by this behavior. |
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PaulBredbury
Watchman
Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 7310
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 3:43 am Post subject: |
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| widremann wrote: | | Actually, on further comparison with the fonts on my tower (Gentoo also), the fonts are still subpar, mainly in Konsole. Some of the stems are still to thick and the letters are still too grainy. |
You're a hard man to please
Have you checked that your fonts (in /usr/share/fonts) are identical? How about pasting the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf from a Fedora distro here? |
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widremann
Veteran
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 3:56 am Post subject: |
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| PaulBredbury wrote: | | widremann wrote: | | Actually, on further comparison with the fonts on my tower (Gentoo also), the fonts are still subpar, mainly in Konsole. Some of the stems are still to thick and the letters are still too grainy. |
You're a hard man to please
Have you checked that your fonts (in /usr/share/fonts) are identical? How about pasting the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf from a Fedora distro here? |
local.conf from Fedora has nothing turned on (it has subpixel rendering commented out, though) and ~/.fonts.conf has medium hinting set and nothing else. I have not ever been able to find what it is that Fedora does that makes the fonts look nice. I've even tried getting all the X11 and font-related RPMs from Fedora and installing them on Gentoo and it doesn't make a damn difference. Also of note was before I installed Gentoo on my laptop, I had Fedora. And I decided to try building my own X server (this always leads to trouble, apparently). When I installed that X server, my fonts now sucked. No amount of reconfiguring or reinstalling RPMs could fix it. It's an intractable problem as far as I can tell. And the fact that otherwise almost identical Gentoo installs on two different machines yield different results for fonts, even when the physically same X server and libraries are used! |
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southsider
Guru
Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 358
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 11:57 am Post subject: |
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Try this, mate.
| Code: | <match target="font">
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
</match> |
(Turned on the Autohinter.) |
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widremann
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Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 2:33 pm Post subject: |
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Well, I did that, and deleted ~/.fonts.conf and KDE automatically puts on medium hinting in that case. So I turned it off and then the fonts were the same. In other words, it made no real difference.
I'm going to try reemerging fontconfig and freetype with default settings/use-flags. Any other font-related packages (besides the font packages themselves) that I should reemerge? |
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southsider
Guru
Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 358
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 4:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Delete your /etc/fonts/local.conf and /etc/fonts/fonts.conf before you re-emerge fontconfig cause I don't think they are overwritten. |
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widremann
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Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Well, I've sort of fixed part of it. I disabled the autohinter, turned off antialiasing and set the DPI down to 72 (from 100). Now Tahoma, for example, looks like it does on Windows. So it was something with the autohinter. I think antialiasing is plain broken for me, but maybe for larger fonts it would be worthwhile to turn it on. |
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metalfan
Apprentice
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 260
Location: 127home0sweet0home1 .endofinternet.net
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| Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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just a guess: but maybe youre using the wrong screen resolution on the tft?
this can cause all sorts of font problems.
greets
metalfan |
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widremann
Veteran
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 1314
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| Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 6:17 pm Post subject: |
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| metalfan wrote: | just a guess: but maybe youre using the wrong screen resolution on the tft?
this can cause all sorts of font problems.
greets
metalfan |
What is the tft? |
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metalfan
Apprentice
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 260
Location: 127home0sweet0home1 .endofinternet.net
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| Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2005 10:57 am Post subject: |
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Tft = Thin Film Transistor, a synonym for lcd.
greets
metalfan |
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micmac
l33t
Joined: 28 Nov 2003
Posts: 996
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| Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2005 11:53 am Post subject: |
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Hi!
Wrongly set DPI can mess things up. If you want to check you can read here.
I got a 1280x1024 pixel TFT with 96 DPI and my fonts are ok after a little tweaking. I tried to emulate my Win XP's fonts look as far as possible. Be warned, I don't like ClearType(tm) enabled. To me it looks fuzzy and I can't look at it very long. Well, everybody has different eyes.
The normal antialising in WinXP doesn't get applied to fonts between 8 and 13 pixels because these tend to look fuzzy otherwise. Small fonts (< don't look fuzzy because your brain just can't catch that (something like that). That's what I told KDE to emulate and it created the following ~/.fonts.conf file:
| Code: |
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
<const>hintfull</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="more" name="size" qual="any" >
<double>8</double>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="size" qual="any" >
<double>13</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="more" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
<double>11</double>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
<double>17</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
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Don't forget to disable sub pixel hinting when you're using a CRT by removing the following:
| Code: |
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
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I use Tahoma all the way, 8 pixel high. For console I use Courier New 10. In Konqueror I use these fonts, too (Tahoma is default), smallest size set to 7 and default size set to 10. What can I say, look for yourself:
fonts
konqueror
(That's exactly how it looks on my monitor)
Cheers
mic |
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akorud
n00b
Joined: 14 Apr 2005
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2005 12:45 pm Post subject: |
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| widremann wrote: | | Karim wrote: | I switched from crt to a Sony lcd recently, and I am disapointed at the font rendering. The kerning is awful sometimes.
Arial and Verdana looks to be the best bet. |
Fact is, Linux fonts suck, especially with LCD. With CRT, you can make them tolerable. |
agreed |
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