Comment 5 for bug 1396582

On 2014-12-19 05:56 (+0100), ~suv wrote:
> The resulting effect is possibly related to changes in upstream
> libraries (freetype, or cairo), as discussed in a similar poppler bug
> report earlier this year describing the same visual effect (darkened
> rendering of text at small sizes with OTF fonts): poppler:
> <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78990> freetype:
> <https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?42406>

Confirmed: after recompiling freetype 2.5.4 with the old (freetype) CFF engine enabled and used by default as described in [1], PDF export now produces the expected result (small type isn't outlined darker in the PDF file). The new Adobe CFF engine was added in freetype 2.5.0 [2], which matches the findings of the local tests with older versions.

Using the old freetype CFF engine also "fixes" Inkscape's 'import via poppler' PDF import option (0.91+devel) and poppler's command line utility 'pdftocairo' (both methods otherwise may produce "fattened" outlined small text in the SVG output).

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree/include/config/ftoption.h#n800
[2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree/docs/CHANGES#n269