fontconfig does not honor hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull

[Kriston Rehberg]

Binary package hint: fontconfig

fontconfig-2.4.2-1.2ubuntu4 does not honor hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull options for the autohinter.
When I ask fontconfig to use the authinter and specify hintstyle as hintslight, hintmedium, or hintfull there is no perceptible difference on the screen. Doing this on a similar Fedora 8 system shows perceptible differences with all settings.
I also tried downloading and compiling freetype2 with the bytecode interpreter forced "off" so the autohinter is always used. The font rendering is certainly the autohinter but there is again no perceptible difference between hintslight, hintmedium, and hintfull.
I suspect but cannot prove that this might be the result of the fontconfig "hack" that was made to enable/disable the legacy LCD filter for monospaced fonts in gutsy.

Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

Binary package hint: fontconfig

fontconfig-2.4.2-1.2ubuntu4 does not honor hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull options for the autohinter.
When I ask fontconfig to use the authinter and specify hintstyle as hintslight, hintmedium, or hintfull there is no perceptible difference on the screen. Doing this on a similar Fedora 8 system shows perceptible differences with all settings.
I also tried downloading and compiling freetype2 with the bytecode interpreter forced "off" so the autohinter is always used. The font rendering is certainly the autohinter but there is again no perceptible difference between hintslight, hintmedium, and hintfull.
I suspect but cannot prove that this might be the result of the fontconfig "hack" that was made to enable/disable the legacy LCD filter for monospaced fonts in gutsy.

Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Can you try to remove /etc/fonts/conf.d/53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf and see if that helps?

If that helps, then we would need some discussion if we should disable that file by default.

As a general note: due to the nature of fontconfig being a system wide setting and users will always have different preferences when it comes to text rendering, it is actually impossible for us to provide a default configuration that works for everyone. Manual tweaking by the user will aways be needed.

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

The problem is not with the LCD filter, it's whether the Ubuntu copy of
freetype is changing the autohint style. When choosing each of the four
options the fonts change their shapes. In Ubuntu, only the "none" and
"full" make any hinting difference. Someone in gutsy changed the
"medium" and "full" buttons to do nothing more than turn on and off the
monospace lcd filter. This needs to be fixed so that the buttons do
what they say.

--
Kriston Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

Arne Goetje wrote:
> Can you try to remove /etc/fonts/conf.d/53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf and
> see if that helps?
>
> If that helps, then we would need some discussion if we should disable
> that file by default.
>
> As a general note: due to the nature of fontconfig being a system wide
> setting and users will always have different preferences when it comes
> to text rendering, it is actually impossible for us to provide a default
> configuration that works for everyone. Manual tweaking by the user will
> aways be needed.
>
> --
> fontconfig does not honor hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/200707
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in Source Package "fontconfig" in Ubuntu: New
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: fontconfig
>
> fontconfig-2.4.2-1.2ubuntu4 does not honor hintslight, hintmedium,
> hintfull options for the autohinter.
> When I ask fontconfig to use the authinter and specify hintstyle as
> hintslight, hintmedium, or hintfull there is no perceptible difference
> on the screen. Doing this on a similar Fedora 8 system shows
> perceptible differences with all settings.
> I also tried downloading and compiling freetype2 with the bytecode
> interpreter forced "off" so the autohinter is always used. The font
> rendering is certainly the autohinter but there is again no perceptible
> difference between hintslight, hintmedium, and hintfull.
> I suspect but cannot prove that this might be the result of the
> fontconfig "hack" that was made to enable/disable the legacy LCD filter
> for monospaced fonts in gutsy.
>
> Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
>
>

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

The problem is not with the LCD filter, it's whether the Ubuntu copy of freetype is changing the autohint style. When choosing each of the four options the fonts normally change their shapes in obvious ways. In Ubuntu gutsy, only the "none" and "full" buttons make any difference. Someone in gutsy changed the "medium" and "full" buttons to do nothing more than turn on and off the monospace lcd filter to keep things simple, but this appears to break the autohinting configuration. This could be due to the fact that Ubuntu normally ships with the autohinter disabled. In any case this needs to be fixed so that the buttons do what they say, that is, adjust autohinter hint styles.

In addition, manually editting ~/.fonts.conf to use the various hint styles does not seem to make any difference so this is therefore a problem with Ubuntu's fontconfig patches.

[Mingming Ren (portis25)]

Could this be a bug of libcairo? Because after comment one line of code in libcairo, the hintstyle sets in ~/.fonts.conf makes effect. I reported it to libcairo, Bug #209256, but got no response.

I'd like to render my fonts in different hintstyles.

To be precise, I have chinese font and western language fonts. For the chinese font, I'd like it to be rendered in hintfull, but for other fonts, I'd prefer hintslight.

Ok, I configured in the fontconfig file, but it didn't make any change. All the fonts are in the same hintstyle, depending on the configuration in gnome-appearance-properties.

I googled for quite a long time and finally I got one solution.

In the file cairo-ft-font.c, in function _cairo_ft_options_merge, just comment the following line:

// if (options->base.hint_style == CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT)

and recompile, now everything works fine. The fonts are rendered according to the hintstyles configured in fontconfig.

I don't know if this is really a bug of libcairo. If I'm wrong, please accept my apology.

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

Mingming, thanks for the comments.
I suspect that the user's settings in fontconfig are not being honored
when an application asserts a setting. This needs to be addressed.
It indeed might be a libcairo thing.
There is still alot of work going on in the new rendering pipeline so
perhaps when the dust clears, so to speak, this issue will be resolved
and there will be a "new" place where this kind of setting is supposed
to be asserted.

Mingming wrote:
> Could this be a bug of libcairo? Because after comment one line of code
> in libcairo, the hintstyle sets in ~/.fonts.conf makes effect. I
> reported it to libcairo, Bug #209256, but got no response.
>
> I'd like to render my fonts in different hintstyles.
>
> To be precise, I have chinese font and western language fonts. For the
> chinese font, I'd like it to be rendered in hintfull, but for other
> fonts, I'd prefer hintslight.
>
> Ok, I configured in the fontconfig file, but it didn't make any change.
> All the fonts are in the same hintstyle, depending on the configuration
> in gnome-appearance-properties.
>
> I googled for quite a long time and finally I got one solution.
>
> In the file cairo-ft-font.c, in function _cairo_ft_options_merge, just
> comment the following line:
>
> // if (options->base.hint_style == CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT)
>
> and recompile, now everything works fine. The fonts are rendered
> according to the hintstyles configured in fontconfig.
>
> I don't know if this is really a bug of libcairo. If I'm wrong, please
> accept my apology.
>
> --
> fontconfig does not honor hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/200707
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in Source Package "fontconfig" in Ubuntu: New
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: fontconfig
>
> fontconfig-2.4.2-1.2ubuntu4 does not honor hintslight, hintmedium,
> hintfull options for the autohinter.
> When I ask fontconfig to use the authinter and specify hintstyle as
> hintslight, hintmedium, or hintfull there is no perceptible difference
> on the screen. Doing this on a similar Fedora 8 system shows
> perceptible differences with all settings.
> I also tried downloading and compiling freetype2 with the bytecode
> interpreter forced "off" so the autohinter is always used. The font
> rendering is certainly the autohinter but there is again no perceptible
> difference between hintslight, hintmedium, and hintfull.
> I suspect but cannot prove that this might be the result of the
> fontconfig "hack" that was made to enable/disable the legacy LCD filter
> for monospaced fonts in gutsy.
>
> Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
>
>

[B. Lin (bellylin)]

Recently I've found a better fix. Set default hintstyle to "CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT"(which is new), and in the function _cairo_ft_options_merge, change

     if (options->base.hint_style == CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT)
         options->base.hint_style = other->base.hint_style;
to
     if (other->base.hint_style != CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT)
         options->base.hint_style = other->base.hint_style;

This should give fair result, i.e., only if hintstyle is specified with fontconfig would the value configured with gnome-settings-daemon be overriden.

[Bugs-freedesktop (bugs-freedesktop)]

The rgba behavior is actually more complicated:
With "echo Xft.rgba: rgb | xrdb -merge"
and <edit name="rgba" mode="assign" ><const>none</const></edit>,

"pango-view -t 'fcgray antialias' --backend=cairo"

renders with rgb subpixel antialiasing.

"--backend=ft2" and "--backend=xft" render with gray antialiasing as expected.

_cairo_ft_options_merge has some complex logic to decide which options
on the scaled_font or on the cairo_ft_font_face (from the FcPattern)
take priority in the way the font behaves.

Assuming that surface options have already been set on the FcPattern with
cairo_ft_font_options_substitute, it is not clear to me why options on the
scaled_font should ever take priority over those from the pattern. If
fontconfig has changed any options on the pattern then that is what the user
(or distribution) wants.

Is the logic in _cairo_ft_options_merge meant to protect against broken
fontconfig settings?

Some surfaces may be pretty keen to have CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_NONE. Also, maybe
surfaces with depth 1 would like CAIRO_ANTIALIAS_NONE and gray surfaces don't
need rgba antialiasing, but maybe changing the load flags based on the color support of the surface would produce some surprises with glyph outline changes.

I wouldn't really see a problem with fontconfig settings always having the
last say (bug 4792 comment 5). fontconfig settings should be able to achieve
their goals without unconditionally setting hinting to true (as true is the
default).

Even if there are some special cases where surface options should take
priority, I can't think why the surface should care what hintstyle is used
once hinting is on. Similarly, I can't think why a color surface should care
if the user asks for gray antialiasing on a font that doesn't hint well to
reduce color fringing.

I wonder whether a cairo_ft_scaled_font_create_for_pattern or
cairo_font_options_merge_from_pattern API might be good so that the
scaled_font can be created with the font_options that will be used, which
would be useful in _cairo_scaled_font_keys_equal.

But merely modifying _cairo_ft_options_merge could enable fontconfig settings
even with the existing API.

[Freedesktop (freedesktop)]

I know I've been surprised by the logic in _cairo_ft_options_merge() before, but decided not to change it without fully understanding it.

I'll look into this after 1.8. Feel free to ping.

[Chris Wilson (ickle)]

*** Bug 13335 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Chris Wilson (ickle)]

*** Bug 4792 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Doublebacks (doublebacks)]

I don't understand why this bug exists such a long time - it's obvious and important. You can't specify different hintstyles for individual fonts through fontconfig - gnome-settings-daemon override all your settings and only one hintstyle for all fonts. This is the main reason I choose KDE: libxft doesn't have this bug.

[ZHANG Yi (dorentus)]

Created an attachment (id=23125)
patch for cairo-ft-font.c

This bug still exists in Debian sid (libcairo2=1.8.6-2).
This simple patch shall fix it, at least it works for me.

[Paul Bredbury (brebs)]

Created an attachment (id=34511)
cairo-respect-fontconfig.patch

(In reply to comment #3)
> I'll look into this after 1.8. Feel free to ping.

Ping!

I've used the enclosed cairo-respect-fontconfig.patch in Gentoo, Fedora, Arch Linux and Lunar Linux. And so have others. It is needed, so as not to partially ignore fontconfig's configuration files. Further info is in this post within Gentoo's huge fonts thread:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-723341-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-258.html

[careta (eusou15)]

Hi, this is an annoying bug, any chance for the patch above to be included in cairo? It solves the problem for me.

[Vish (vish)]

Switching task to reflect upstream bug report.

[Grogi (grogi)]

Bug still there (1.8.10) and cairo-respect-fontconfig.patch still works...
Simple fix, waiting far too long to be fixed in codebase.

I did some digging and condition (options->base.hint_style == CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_DEFAULT) would be only true if Xft.hintstyle had a unrecognized value, for instance 5. Empty value will falls back to CAIRO_HINT_STYLE_FULL.

[Grogi (grogi)]

Created an attachment (id=37489)
The complete patch for respecing Fontconfig in Cairo. Hintstyle / RGBA / LCDFilter are supported now.

The routines dealing with data returned by Fontconfig have been rewritten to support all properties. The logic is simple - if anything is returned by Fontconfig, it will be respected. If not, the xrdb/Xft settings are used.

[Freedesktop (freedesktop)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> Created an attachment (id=37489) [details]
> The complete patch for respecing Fontconfig in Cairo. Hintstyle / RGBA /
> LCDFilter are supported now.
>
> The routines dealing with data returned by Fontconfig have been rewritten to
> support all properties. The logic is simple - if anything is returned by
> Fontconfig, it will be respected. If not, the xrdb/Xft settings are used.

Quick comments:

1. No unnecessary whitespace changes please.
2. No C++-style comments please.
3. If you can, break down the patch into bite-size chunks such that I can review the behvaior change instead of blanket-approving it.

Thanks

[Piernik (piernik)]

Please excuse me if this is not the best place to bring this topic, but what exactly is the point of supporting all these Xft.<option> xresources?

Maybe I'm a bit uniformed but this stuff is broken by design anyway (hence fontconfig). I mean, toolkits and whatnot shouldn't give a f..k about those options because all they should care about is fontconfig. Setting some Xft.<foo> is global (is terms of fonts) and this is what makes it almost totally useless. Everyone who digs fonts knows that you can't get all your fonts right just by setting some global options. Most good quality fonts (mostly from professional font foundries, but not only) require "tweaks" in hintstyle etc. to look good (in other words - they only look good with e.g. hintstyle=hintslight). If you set Xft.hintstyle to hintmedium, you get one group of fonts properly shaped and in the same time some other group of fonts to look suboptimal or unacceptable.

[This is also a good place to point out that approach taken by tools like gnome-appearance-properties (which tries to screw^Wsave the world by playing with Xft xresources/xsettings via gnome-settings-daemon) is blatantly naive, except if you're blind or just used to bad looking screen fonts.]

"But these are just Xft defaults and we should obey them" you may say. Yeah, but dealing with those legacy options brings SO MUCH CONFUSION and bizarre bugs I lack words to describe it. Every toolkit/app and their dog tries to do something with them and almost always fails to do it right (perhaps because it's impossible to do so). Let's take emacs for an example. Emacs can use gtk2 and fontconfig, but not cairo. It pretty much succeeds but what's striking is that it basically fucks up FcPatterns by modifying them with stuff from Xft xresources. After getting them from fontconfig, so any carefully crafted (font/pattern-specific or not) fontconfig configuration gets ignored. It'll screw it even if Xft.<foo> stuff isn't set. It's a disaster. Qt, OpenOffice, Java runtime... ugh. *Even cairo can't get its shit together.*

The bottom line is: why not use fontconfig for everything, so app/toolkit developers won't do stupid things like the mentioned above?

Freetype is pretty capable of providing good results, but bugs like this simply prevent demanding users from making use of it.

Also, If you don't believe this stuff, just google around, see how users are struggling in confusion.

Sorry for the style of this comment. I couldn't help myself. My English is so poor I can only rant ;)

[Bugs-freedesktop (bugs-freedesktop)]

(In reply to comment #13)
> The bottom line is: why not use fontconfig for everything,

Fontconfig doesn't know whether the text is being rendered to an LCD screen or a printer, so fontconfig needs to be told subpixel order and whether hinting is appropriate.

Problems happen when fontconfig rules blindly override such information (bug 17722, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105797), as well as when apps/toolkits blindly override fontconfig patterns (this bug).

[Piernik (piernik)]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Fontconfig doesn't know whether the text is being rendered to an LCD screen or
> a printer, so fontconfig needs to be told subpixel order and whether hinting is
> appropriate.

I admit I don't know how printing specific rendering is being done. Is it that antialiasing and hinting are turned off because printer resolution is much higher than screen and it wouldn't make sense to leave them on? (no visible effect?)

> Problems happen when fontconfig rules blindly override such information (bug
> 17722

Sorry for discussing bug 17722 here, but how come that rules in 10-sub-pixel-*.conf can override anything? Isn't it how defaults supposed to be set, giving that "50-user.conf" can override it later and any "low-level" fontconfig user can do the same if needed? (and virtually all Xft.rgba touching stuff does it anyway? Or doesn't? Or is xrm/fc priority issue? See? This should be nuked.)

[Grogi (grogi)]

Created attachment 42713
Revised version of respect-fontconfig patch against 1.10.2 version.

I am sending the updated patch, with comments from Behdad Esfahbod incorporated.

There are two routines modified with this patch:

* _cairo_ft_options_merge - changes here are small and focus on having the same algorithm for all font properties: if other structure define a property (it does not equal CAIRO_*_DEFAULT), this value will be used. Sometimes there is some additional processing for antialiasing required - in case the subpixel antialiasing is forced on, but physical screen structure is unknown, the type of antialiasing (Subpixel/Gray) has to be calculated based on values in options structure.

* _get_pattern_ft_options - this routine loads FontConfig information into cairo_ft_options_t structure.

** The most significant change here covers the fact, that hinting information wasn't processed if antialiasing was switched off.

** Another change in behavior applies to antialiasing information - basically there are 7 different combination of FontConfig properties ('antialias' and 'rgba') values that define different behavior, but they cannot be naturally represented in cairo_ft_options_t structure (in theory it could be done, but with extremely nasty approach). As changing the contract and defining additional value for _cairo_subpixel_order type would be rather wrong idea, the routine will assume user wanted to switch on antialiasing when the 'rgba' property is defined.

[Grogi (grogi)]

Created attachment 42714
Revised version of respect-fontconfig patch against 1.10.2 version - for easy reading

Just modified methods - for easy reading...

[Zhou Yi Chao (broken-zhou)]

One year passes. Is there anything stopping this patch merged to the main line?

[Freedesktop (freedesktop)]

Karl, do you think you would have the time to review the patch?

[Bugs-freedesktop (bugs-freedesktop)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> (In reply to comment #14)
> > Fontconfig doesn't know whether the text is being rendered to an LCD screen or
> > a printer, so fontconfig needs to be told subpixel order and whether hinting is
> > appropriate.
>
> I admit I don't know how printing specific rendering is being done. Is it that
> antialiasing and hinting are turned off because printer resolution is much
> higher than screen and it wouldn't make sense to leave them on? (no visible
> effect?)

Not just that the printer resolution is higher, but the resolution may not
even be known at the time of generating the PDF or PS output.

[Bugs-freedesktop (bugs-freedesktop)]

Comment on attachment 42713
Revised version of respect-fontconfig patch against 1.10.2 version.

Review of attachment 42713:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

(In reply to comment #16)

Thanks for the helpful overview of the changes.

> * _cairo_ft_options_merge - changes here are small and focus on having the same
> algorithm for all font properties: if other structure define a property (it
> does not equal CAIRO_*_DEFAULT), this value will be used.

I'd like to agree in principle, but we need at least one exception to this
rule.

If FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING is not set, but hint_metrics is CAIRO_HINT_METRICS_OFF,
x_advance/y_advance metrics will not be hinted, but x/y_bearing/width/height
metrics and outlines will still be hinted.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490475#c5 says "cairo PDF/PS
always embeds (and subsets) the fonts used. If subsetting fails it will
fallback to embedding a font generated from the unhinted outlines of the
glyphs."
And https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490475#c19 says "Hintstyle
should also be set to none for printing although this only affects the use of
fallback fonts where cairo embeds a font created from the glyph outlines."

That means that a HINT_STYLE_NONE on the surface will need to override
fontconfig. I guess we could argue that users shouldn't have fontconfig
settings that turn on hinting if it has been turned off, but history has shown
that people will use fontconfig to turn on hinting, overriding an explicitly
set value in the pattern.

There are also times when the font_options should be able to override the
cairo antialias option from fontconfig. This would be beneficial if the
destination surface is monochrome or grayscale and so doesn't support the same
antialiasing options, or if the destination is a translucent part of a
CONTENT_COLOR_ALPHA surface and so component-alpha will be lost before the
glyphs are composited onto an opaque background (leading to excessive color
fringing). I think what we want for cairo antialias is not a priority of
fontconfig over other interests, but the greatest common method among those
supported and desired. The current code doesn't provide this exception,
however.

> * _get_pattern_ft_options - this routine loads FontConfig information into
> cairo_ft_options_t structure.
>
> ** The most significant change here covers the fact, that hinting information
> wasn't processed if antialiasing was switched off.

Yes, processing hinting and hintstyle to determine whether to hint seems the
right thing to do (even if I don't know of a good reason, apart from testing
perhaps, why anyone would want to turn off hinting through fontconfig if
antialias has been set to false).

> ** Another change in behavior applies to antialiasing information - basically
> there are 7 different combination of FontConfig properties ('antialias' and
> 'rgba') values that define different behavior, but they cannot be naturally
> represented in cairo_ft_options_t structure (in theory it could be done, but
> with extremely nasty approach). As changing the contract and defining
> additional value for _cairo_subpixel_order type would be rather w...

[BubuXP (bubuxp)]

This bug is still present.
Any hope to see it fixed someday?

I suppose that using Wayland this bug should vanish. Am I right?

[Lavir the Whiolet (lavir-th-whiolet)]

Created attachment 109191
GIMP font rendering

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=657047 refers to this bug. The referring bug is about black border around text rendered with Cairo with non-black color, antialiasing turned on and hinting set to "medium".