Comment 11 for bug 80921

You’re basically comparing Splash with Cairo, and so the fonts are likely to be rendered in very different ways (like different hinting methods). If you compare Cairo with subpixel Cairo, you should find that the letter spacing is identical; all that will change is that the letters will be sharper on LCD screens. (It is theoretically possible to take advantage of subpixel rendering to position letters more accurately in 1/3-pixel increments, but I don’t think current Cairo does that yet.)

Any color artifacts you see are Cairo’s fault. I recommend applying this patch, which makes Cairo use Freetype 2.3’s (much better) subpixel filtering: <http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/patches/cairo-1.2.4-lcd-filter-1.patch> Anyway, any improvements in these areas are Cairo’s job and not Poppler’s.

On the Poppler side, all we need to do is figure out the clipping problem I mentioned above, and make Poppler respect the desktop-wide font rendering settings.