[edgy] extremely bold ttf fonts in kubuntu (edgy)

[lor]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg

after upgrade to edgy i've noticed that microsoft's true type tahoma font is extremely anti aliased. so it looks very bold. in dapper ttf fonts looked much more nice

[Rich Johnson (nixternal)]

Is there a way I can reproduce this? How are you able to view Microsoft's TTF Tahoma font?

[Xavier (chantry-xavier)]

According to this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=244514&page=2
Ubuntos said he reported this bug.
Then he set hinting to full, and he was happy.

It's possibly a duplicate of https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/63403
(if it's really a bug)

[JS (j5)]

I confirm this problem. For me it happened with all DejaVu fonts. Specifically, the font rendering engine did not seem to use hints; for example, the vertical bars of the letters were no longer aligned with screen pixels and the result was hard-to-read and blurry (and, in many cases, the fonts looked bolder than usually). Worked fine in Kubuntu 6.06, broke when I updated (with apt-get) to Kubuntu 6.10.

Changing the hinting level in the KDE font settings from medium to full indeed solves the problem. However, I would like to emphasise that the medium level used to be the default setting; thus, I think a large number of users have ~/.fonts.conf files with settings that used to work but no longer work. I wonder if all of them can figure out how to fix the problem.

The same thing happened in Debian earlier, see the following bug report for more information:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=367964

[Xavier (chantry-xavier)]

I do not understand what you mean by "settings work".
It's the developpers who choose settings and offer them to the user,
settings just mean what they want to. Settings work when they do what
the developper meant them to do, and now it's the case.
Slight and Medium hinting are supposed to look the same, and Full
hinting is different.
I'm not sure if it's directly related, but cairo used to have a
different behavior than xft, it didn't interpret font rendering
settings the same way, and now it has been fixed.
However, this problem remains in edgy, not all apps render smooth /
blurred fonts when Medium hinting is used. I don't know if its fonts
related libs are up to date.
By the way, slight and medium hinting forces use of autohinting. If
you get sharp fonts with full hinting, it's because you're using the
bytecode interpreter, which is patented. If you think this is fine and
should be the default, then just ask that full hinting is used by
default.