Evince ignores font hinting settings

[Alexander Jones]

Binary package hint: evince

I specifically set my system to disable font hinting because I prefer the appearance.

However, Evince still insists on using hinting when rendering. As a result, I get particularly bad (worse than normal) text rendering with all documents. See attached screenshot for example.

Zooming in and out causes apparent font weight to increase and decrease by massive amounts. Worse still is that italicized text at the same zoom level appears thinner for Times New Roman. See screenshot for example. Notice also under point 4 the italic "zero" has its diagonal bar in the "z" missing. This is just another issue with font hinting, but illustrates the problem well.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That bug has been opened on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/87230

"Binary package hint: evince

I specifically set my system to disable font hinting because I prefer the appearance.

However, Evince still insists on using hinting when rendering. As a result, I get particularly bad (worse than normal) text rendering with all documents. See attached screenshot for example.

Zooming in and out causes apparent font weight to increase and decrease by massive amounts. Worse still is that italicized text at the same zoom level appears thinner for Times New Roman. See screenshot for example. Notice also under point 4 the italic "zero" has its diagonal bar in the "z" missing. This is just another issue with font hinting, but illustrates the problem well.
...
http://librarian.launchpad.net/6512242/hinting.png
Screenshot"

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10218

[Marciano Siniscalchi (msiniscalchi)]

I believe this is the same bug as #9862: Poppler (and xpdf before it) uses a hard-coded, compile-time check to determine whether or not to use hinting, and is this insensitive to runtime settings.

I originally reported #9862 on Launchpad, and the kind of rendering in the above attachment looks sadly familiar... :-(

[Alexander Jones (alex-weej)]

Is this fixed?

[Alexander Jones (alex-weej)]

I think this is fixed. Awaiting upstream confirmation.

[Alexander Jones (alex-weej)]

FWIW, I am absolutely convinced that Evince should never be using hinting, and not even be using metrics hinting in PDFs, due to the layout being defined in the PDF.

[penguin (myfreemail)]

This bug still exists on Ubuntu 12.04

Evince Version: 3.4.0
cairo: 0.18.4

[Gitlab-migration (gitlab-migration)]

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/288.