Fonts in Mageia

[zugunder]

Hi,

I am returning to this thread since I have not been able to adjust the fonts' quality according to my needs... Well, I may be too demanding, but there are a couple of new details I have found that may be interesting for users and, probably, to developers as well.
As I mentioned in the very beginning, Mageia1 doesn't have activated lcdfilter option out of the box, which is quite a drawback in my opinion, because the fonts on LCD and LED screens look just ugly without filtering (IMHO, IMHO, IMHO everywhere...). I tried different settings of lcdfilter combined with subpixel hinting and on my screen the best option is lcddefault filter with slight hinting. However, there are a couple of things that make me puzzled:

1. It seems to me that ALL Serif fonts I tried (about 10-15) look substantially better than, say, Sans (even from the same family). For example, DejaVu and Liberation: Sans and Serif of the same size look dramatically different. But the same situation is in M$ fonts: Arial looks much fuzzier than Times New Roman of the same size at the same settings. Interestingly, more condensed fonts, like Droid Sans or Liberation Sans look slightly better than, for example, DejaVu Sans or Verdana.

2. I noticed that changing subpixel hinting setting from none to slight and from slight to medium impacts the fonts' quality seriously, however, fonts at full hinting look almost the same as at medium. It would be great in my opinion to "decrease" actual hinting at medium setting, as the fonts at slight hinting are a little bit fuzzy and become really thin at medium. In addition to that, at medium setting color fringing already appears (with lcddefault), which is pretty bad.

Hope this might be of some interest.

Thank you.

[dubigrasu]

I'm throwing a thought here, it may mean something or maybe nothing, but anyway...

I struggled for a while with this font problem on my LCD, no matter what I did it wasn't good enough, the fonts were still looking jagged. There were tiny imperfections in fonts rendering especially visible with small text. A good test to reveal them was to slooowly move the window containing the text across the screen.
Eventually I gave up, I found the most acceptable compromise and leave them so.

My LCD's native resolution is 1368x768 so naturally I used that one.
However, one day purely by accident I decreased the resolution slightly to 1360x768 instead of 1368x768
and like magic all the imperfections went away, I mean totally.

So what I'm saying is that sometimes the problem may not lay in the way fonts are rendered, but the in way the LCD actually displays them. A small change in resolution can easily fix the problem (sometimes).

Something to keep in mind.

[zugunder]

Thank you, debigrasu, for this tip! It doesn't seem to work for me (I have the same 1366x768 native resolution), but maybe I missed something...
Could you provide me with the settings you have in MCC > Hardware > Setup the graphical server and the screen size and refresh rate that are set and reported by KRandRTray?
Thank you!

[anshuljain]

Fonts are very subjective..some prefer the stock non-autohinted fonts (old freetype w/o the bytecode interpreter), some like the autohinted (Apple's bytecode interpreter)..others (like me) prefer subpixeled fonts which are tweaked massively by Ubuntu and Infinality. GNOME renders applications using cairo..while KDE (Qt) renders it through Freetype and some render it through .Xresources. I believe the tainted version of freetype in Mageia's repos is built with the bytecode interpreter and subpixel hinting enabled. Check if the steps in this link work for you :- viewtopic.php?f=7&t=384#p2504 .

[zugunder]

Thank you, anshuljain, for the explanations.
The problem here is that subpixel hinting works, and it works fine, but I can't find a satisfactory intermediate setting of filtering/hinting - the fonts are either too blurry or color fringing is too strong.

[anshuljain]

Are you using KDE? If so, then color fringing is a major problem for all kinds of font hinting methods. Its a bug in Qt and hopefully it should be resolved soon.

[zugunder]

Ah, I did not know about it... I just do not remember having such problems in KDE3, but it may be just deceptive illusions from long ago, when the grass was greener and water was more wet...

[zugunder]

Hi,

I've been checking the font rendering libraries installed on my system and I have a question.
What is the difference between lib(64)cairo2 and lib(64)cairo-xcb2? Surprisingly, I have installed by default lib64cairo2 and libcairo-xcb2 only... Why do I have different versions in use for 64 and 32-bit applications? Actually, I replaced libcairo-xcb2 with libcairo2 and I do not see any differences...

Thank you.

[doktor5000]

libcairo-xcb is cairo with an enabled xcb backend (which is said to be unstable and buggy, but needed for some programs like awesome). libcairo is the default (cf /etc/urpmi/prefer.vendor.list)