On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com>wrote:
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 07:41 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Jason D. Clinton <me(a)jasonclinton.com>
wrote:
>
> > Fonts: LCD panel wasn't detected for sub-pixel rendering; fonts are
blurry
> > by default. Overall font quality is poor in contrast to default install
of
> > competitors' distros.
>
> Now, that the nasty patents expired we should be able to get better
> looking fonts in F13.
>
> I should ping bedhad to do that.
'Nicer' is subjective. I don't actually like the patented rendering, I
prefer the non-patented. The above isn't actually referring to the
patented stuff, anyway - just whether subpixel hinting is enabled by
default.
While I did mention the not-default sub-pixel, in fact, all the fonts look
poorer in contrast to other distributions even when comparing sub-pixel to
sub-pixel. And while font weighting can be quite subjective as you mention,
the font hinting and kerning for the default desktop UI is just
algorithmicly wrong. Look at "About this Computer" in the System menu.
"b"
has a giant loop while the adjacent "o" is 3/4's of b's width. There
are, of
course, examples all over the place of these hinting issues. In some cases,
vertical lines fail to weight to an integer position resulting one side or
the other having additional aliasing. Some fonts appear to be affected by
this shortcoming more than others.