Fontconfig should default to full hinting

[Pascal de Bruijn]

Binary package hint: fontconfig

dpkg -S /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf
fontconfig-config: /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf

Ubuntu Hardy has the following symlink by default:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 2008-04-02 19:17 10-hinting-medium.conf -> ../conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf

This really should (instead) be:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 2008-04-02 19:17 10-hinting-full.conf -> ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf

This default is causing issue like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/190848

[Daniel R. (danielr-es)]

Hi,

I confirm this bug in Hardy.

I also confirm that the workaround above works for me. Now gnome-terminal looks like gutsy's (as it should be)

[Alex Salt (holy.cheater)]

Yep, had the same issue. Changed hinting from medium to full - now monospace fonts look good in gnome terminal

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

This is still an issue with Intrepid.

This is trivially fixed! Please attend to this before Intrepid's release.

[Patrik (p-burkhalter)]

This really should be fixed. Please have a look at the attachment.

[Ivan N. Zlatev (e-contact-i-nz-net)]

This is a fairly important bug IMHO because the experience with the "Slight" hinting is bad out of the box.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

This is still a problem with Ubuntu Karmic!

Ubuntu Karmic's font rendering is completely unbearable out of the box... Another issues that has popped up with Karmic is that Firefox 3.5 seems to ignore font rendering settings per user, and always uses system default. So even when I set hinting to full in my user account. Firefox still uses the crappy slight hinting...

Just remove:
/etc/fonts.conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf -> ../conf.avail/10-hinting-slight.conf

And link the following instead:
/etc/fonts.conf.d/10-hinting-full.conf -> ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf

And the problem is completely resolved. Such a trivial fix. I hope this will make it into Karmic Final.

[Stéphan Kochen (stephank)]

Pascal, I found this bug report through you blog post, FYI.

I'd like to add some counterweight here, but I'm not sure if I'm making assumptions. Is changing the hinting option in the appearance control panel the same as switching those symlinks?

Because setting the hinting to full there actually makes fonts look rather blocky in my case, even squished together. I've attached a screenshot for comparison.

Could be that I tried to work around the problem by picking a different font, rather than a different hinting setting. The text in that screenshot is all in Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter.

Besides the slight hinting, I also have sub-pixel rendering on and set to RGB. But I'm not sure what other settings matter in this case.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Maybe that's matter of preference?

The fonts aren't blocky... They're just sharp and crisp...

The slightly hinted fonts give me a headache because of their fuzzyness...

[Stéphan Kochen (stephank)]

On 14-09-09 01:00, Pascal de Bruijn wrote:
> Maybe that's matter of preference?
>
> The fonts aren't blocky... They're just sharp and crisp...
>
> The slightly hinted fonts give me a headache because of their
> fuzzyness...

In the screenshot I uploaded, the characters sometimes touch or overlap
with full hinting. In the highlighted parts, closely look at 'ar' in
'Spark', and 'Al' in 'Algemeen'.

Apart from what I find pleasant to look at, the smoothing with slight
hinting, to me, pretty much resembles what I see in OS X. I personally
hold Apple in high regard when it comes to typography. But then, I
really know next to nothing about typography.

If it really is a matter of preference, then what are the arguments for
changing the default? How can we tell which is right?

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Well, first, you're using a commercial font for comparison, which renders particularly well with slight hinting, other fonts do not fare as well. Also, are you using a non-standard size as well? 9pt?

I've attached a comparison using the default font in Ubuntu 'sans', which is aliased to DejaVu Sans if I'm not mistaken. The font here is also at it's default size 10pt.

With Slight hinting DejaVu Sans looks fat and fuzzy, and with full hinting it looks crystal clear, with no overlapping characters. Well the ffi are touching, but those letters are intentionally kerned in a cozy way, to more or less emulate a ligature...

[Stéphan Kochen (stephank)]

On 14-09-09 11:56, Pascal de Bruijn wrote:
> Well, first, you're using a commercial font for comparison, which
> renders particularly well with slight hinting, other fonts do not fare
> as well. Also, are you using a non-standard size as well? 9pt?
>
> I've attached a comparison using the default font in Ubuntu 'sans',
> which is aliased to DejaVu Sans if I'm not mistaken. The font here is
> also at it's default size 10pt.

Thanks for that screenshot. Even if it was just to convince me.

That and going back to Patrik's screenshot, the default fonts definitely
look better with full hinting.

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

Setting this bug to Triaged as its cause is known.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

arne, whats your thought on full hinting this round?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

not really a hundred paper cut as we don't know if we want this already.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Alexander Sack wrote:
> arne, whats your thought on full hinting this round?
>
I don't think we will ever enable full hinting system wide. The only
font in our repository which can profit from full hinting right now is
DejaVu, which we do use as a default font on the desktop. But many
languages cannot use DejaVu and need to use other fonts instead. For
those and any other font on the system full hinting would be a disadvantage.
We can set hinting to full selectively for DejaVu only (and any font
which comes with instructions) in the font package. However, I don't
know if this works correctly as I didn't see any visual difference on my
system when trying this. Need to investigate further.
Also, if you use a dpi setting higher than 125 or so, you may want to
disable hinting altogether.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

First, high DPI screens, are pretty rare, and very expensive.... Or found on insanely expensive laptops...

Most real screens are genuinely 98dpi (close to the default of 96), and we should default to what works for 95% of what people have... which is a low dpi screen...

I _think_ Liberation benefits as well...

And don't forget about every commercial (grade) font in existantance should benefit from this...

If fonts in our repo don't look good with full hinting, then it's not full hinting which is broken... But the font itself...

Leaving the default hinting at slight, is at best an extremely nasty workaround...

In my screenshot example, I used the menu's as example, but the "Mono" font which is DejaVu Sans Mono, looks even worse on a terminal, it's not ugly, but completely unusable...

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

@ Pascal de Brujin

I fail to see how 95% of the users would benefit from full hinting. We have tested the current settings on various screens (including very cheap ones!) and it provides the best overall experience and readability. Please also remember that the dpi and quality of screens constantly improves and full hinting on any modern laptop screen just looks plain ugly. Also, Firefox doesn't seem to respect the hinting change (not sure if that's a known issue or it's just me) which results in different appearance from the rest of the system.

What we should work on instead is a good font config interface that would enable the users to easily pick the best solution for their screen. In the ideal world this would happen automatically, but, as it often happens, we're not quite there yet with all the required pieces :)

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Somehow (last time I checked with Karmic) Firefox 3.5 only uses the system wide hinting setting, and not the local setting...

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

the ffox 3.5 issue is bug 379761

[Laszlo_Lebrun (lazlo-lebrun)]

IMHO the discussion about the best defaults is a vain one.
The apps of Ubuntu must conform to the GTK settings chosen by the user. Period.
The defaults are just that, defaults.

Firefox is primitively a QT app, is it?
AFAIK Ubuntu used to have a daemon to replicate the GTK settings to the QT counterpart, which is obviously not working here or be started too early or too late.
Unfortunaltely i am not able to give more details, I used to be confronted to this problem half a year ago with XFCE and cannot remember more about this daemon.
Currently the system wide settings are working... sometimes, never from booting, just fiddle around with the system settings and it will come.

The most evident setting to find out is my favourite one: all prop fonts set to arial/times, full hinting, no anti-aliasing.
You get 100% crisp fonts or a blurry crap, depending of if it works or not.

Regards
Laszlo

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Firefox isn't a QT app...

It's XUL with GTK on top...

[Laszlo_Lebrun (lazlo-lebrun)]

Anyhow it seams that I got rid of the bug.
I had installed the KDE4 Systemsettings app, from there I copied the same settings than GTK.
It worked once but after rebooting I got the same ugly font defaults.

Disappointed, I removed the useless KDE4 Systemsettings with Synaptic again.

From that point on, the GTK settings worked perfectly and survived all the reboots!
???
Maybe this could help, by serendipity, to find out what's wrong.

Regards

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

fontconfig defaults to slight hinting both in Ubuntu and upstream. This seems to produce the best results for the most people.