[Devel] Artifacts in aliased font rendering

[Suzanne Skinner]

Greetings,

Recent versions of freetype cause small but annoying artifacts in the rendering
of aliased truetype fonts (specifically, Microsoft core web fonts). This is as
compared to the much older freetype used as the basis for xfsft, which has
always rendered beautifully for me. In all cases, the patented bytecode
interpreter is enabled (the degradation is of course much greater without it.)

I've rigged up a webpage to show an example of what I mean, located at
http://www.igs.net/~tril/freetype/ . It displays aliased Verdana text. The text
on the left is rendered by the XFree86 4.2.0 "freetype" backend. The text on
the right is rendered by freetype 2.1.8 using Xft/fontconfig. There are few
differences, but note the artifacts on the "S" in "Start Menu" and the "D" in
"Desktop Options". I've zoomed in on those letters below.

FYI, I get similar but worse results when rendering text through the freetype
backend included with the new XOrg release (again, the bytecode interpreter was
turned on). Same annoying tickmarks on the capital D, plus various spacing
problems.

Any chance this can be improved in future versions of freetype?

Thanks!
Suzanne

-- 
address@hidden - http://www.igs.net/~tril/
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