Comment 106 for bug 164640

(In reply to comment #68)
> Carl, you really should try maintaining a distro's text stack for a couple
> years before you get it: There is no sensible defaults. People file bugs
> about their text rendering where it looks perfectly fine to me. Certainly much
> better than what they call the unbuggy version. Choosing filters based on
> hintstyle, or exposing some but not other filters is simply not cairo's
> business. Smple as that.

I don't buy it, Behdad.

Certainly, you have experience that I don't here. I don't content that. And users often do want text-rendering results that seem hard to believe---I've seen that.

But as for the details of which kind of LCD filtering---your distribution has never made that available as an option, right? So what evidence do you have that people won't be satisfied here? Just that "they're never satisfied"?

I'd really like to do something very much like "strong hinting"->"current filtering" and "slight/medium hinting"->"freetype's FIR5 filtering" and see if that satisfies people. And best would be to do that experiment by way of the new text-preferences dialog where people choose the version that they like the best. I really can't imagine many people saying "none of the above". (I think most hard-to-understand complaints come from people not being able to achieve a result that they are accustomed to---and that's precisely part of the reason that led to the revert of the freetype-filter using code during 1.7.x.)

-Carl