[1 mod] Italic 6pt less readable than Italic 5pt

[Iván Stepaniuk]

Rendered in 6pt Italic

Sample Glyphs:

life

Description:

Italic 6pt loos to be less readable than Italic 5pt, specially noticeable in the word "life" as the lowercase "L" and "I" glyphs are almost overlapping

LCD Screen , HRGB pixel order.
Firefox (Debian Iceweasel 3.5.10)

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100623 Iceweasel/3.5.10 (like Firefox/3.5.10)

[Iván Stepaniuk (istepaniuk)]

The previous screenshot did not show the problem

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Mmmm, at 1-3 pixels width per character it really is starting to get hard to draw a character with any hope of readability and you're relying on word shapes. However, one would assume that the smaller (5 point) size would be harder to read, than its larger (6 point) cousin, so I'll ask one of the DM people to look into this /after/ release. It could also be that the system-wide font rendering configuration changes settings at ~5pt as it "gives up" trying to alter (hint) the outlines to improve readability where there simply isn't the pixel currency to do so.

[Iván Stepaniuk (istepaniuk)]

As you suggested, the issue only shows when the system-wide font rendering configuration has the hinting set to either 'Medium' or 'Full', but not when selecting 'None' or 'Slight'.