Re: [Devel] Possible regression?

[David Turner]

Hell Rayiner,

Rayiner Hashem wrote:
> Hello, this is Rayiner Hashem. I've been using FreeType 2.1.4 RC-2 for a while 
> now, and recently switched to 2.1.4. In doing so, I noticed a degradation in 
> italic font rendering. The difference can be seen at:
>
> http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gtg990h/font-compare.png
>
> The top image is from FreeType 2.1.4 while the bottom image is from 2.1.4-RC2. 
> Both are just the "stock" tarballs from the FreeType FTP site, with no 
> changes before compiling. If you look at the images, you'll notice the 
> following defects in 2.1.4-final's rendering.
>
> 1) On the 8-pt line, the 'p' in "pt"
> 2) On the 8-pt line, the "yp" in "FreeType"
> 3) On the 10-pt line, the 'p' in "pt"
> 4) On the 10-pt line, the "yp" in "FreeType"
> 5) On the 12-pt line, the 'p' in "pt"
> 6) On the 12-pt line, the word "rendered"
>
> Besides that, in just general use, sites that use italic fonts extensively 
> look much worse in terms of stroke weighting across lines. 
It's not exactly a "regression". The improvement found in 2.1.4-RC2 was
removed from the final release because it didn't please a certain number
of people who complained on the list. Since it was experimental and we
wanted to freeze features to make a stable release, it has been moved
from the default rendering mode to the optional FT_RENDER_MODE_LIGHT
mode.

Note that I don't know how it's possible to tell fontconfig or Xft to
use this mode, or activate it globally in Gnome/KDE/YaddaYadda..

Later releases of the library might contain further improvements that
please all parties involved, but I won't make any promise here...

Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)







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