[Devel] Help me understand this... I'm loosing my sanity. Please.

[David Chester]

Hello,

> Basically, I am trying to figure out why the antialiased fonts in the
> debian (KDE 3.1.1) are so much worse than in redhat 8 and 9.
...
> 7. I noticed that redhat 8 sets the following resources by default:
> 
> Xft.dpi:        96
> Xft.hinting:    true
> Xft.hintstyle:  hintmedium

Redhat 8 uses a modified freetype and a modified Xft2 to offer different 
levels of hinting (all using the autohinter and ps hinter).

> The problem is difficult to explain, and I don't have a web site where
> I can post some pictures. Anyway, it looks like in debian the color of
> the antialiased fonts is unevenly distributed, resulting in some very
> thin lines and some very thick ones, in the same font.

The autohinter in 2.1.4 is pretty good about stem width consistency, and the 
byte code interpreter is very good in that regard.  So is it possible that 
your Luxi fonts are in postscript format (with a .pfb extension)?  I seem to 
remember that there are both versions (ttf and pfb) floating around the web.  
If you are not using the newly implemented FT_RENDER_MODE_LIGHT with the 
postscript hinter, you might run into effects like what you describe above.

Using a stock freetype-2.1.4, and default fonts.conf, along with truetype 
versions of the Luxi family, I don't see any problem with uneven stem widths.

If you are in fact using postscript Luxi fonts, try using the truetype 
versions instead, which will force the interpreter or the autohinter to be 
used instead of the ps hinter.  You might also try forcing the autohinter 
manually.  I cant remember if there's a way to do that in fonts.conf.  

I would also recommend downloading and building freetype-2.1.4, and 
ft2demos-2.1.4.  That way, with the ftview program, you can quickly test the 
rendering quality on different fonts, with different configurations.

David Chester