The Latest Pango + HarfBuzz Is Leading To A Messy Font Rendering Situation For Some

[kpedersen]

I'm just a mere user, but I consider rude to say others to use HiDiPi instead. This makes me reconsider to use Linux ecosystem as a desktop platform, seriously.

The Gnome 3 desktop has forced users to have a "decent" GPU for a while. Why not force a "decent" monitor too?

Not having a HiDiPi screen is what they called "old technology". You need to be modern.

[Xaero_Vincent]

The Gnome 3 desktop has forced users to have a "decent" GPU for a while. Why not force a "decent" monitor too?

Not having a HiDiPi screen is what they called "old technology". You need to be modern.

I hope you're joking because it's plain false. Gnome works fine on integrated graphics and on my standard 1080p screen.

The snarky comments of a disgruntled HarfBuzz developer don't reflect that of reality.

[jabl]

I think there should be greater efforts, more manpower and better consensus at text rendering. I would love to happen that only one library/subsystem be used by all major players, then concentrate on making it have all the desired features.

Avoiding wheel reinvention is what they're doing. Harfbuzz has been a phenomenal success, and is actively maintained. Pango, somewhat less so. As contributors aren't growing on trees, they're leveraging Harfbuzz as much as possible instead of having to maintain similar functionality themselves.

And even so, Harfbuzz doesn't have infinite resources, hence they have to make choices on where to spend their time. Such as not bothering to support Type1 or bitmap fonts. Trying to be everything for everyone just leads to software with a million tuning knobs that does everything poorly. The best they can do is to be awesome for the vast majority.

[angrypie]

I hope you're joking because it's plain false. Gnome works fine on integrated graphics and on my standard 1080p screen.

The snarky comments of a disgruntled HarfBuzz developer don't reflect that of reality.

The other day I was experimenting with GPU drivers and eventually ended up with no hardware acceleration. I was surprised how well GNOME ran on software rendering, but then I remembered it's CPU bound, not GPU bound.

[evil_core]

ClearType has always looked like ass, and it only got worse with newer Windows versions (though Vista was slightly acceptable). I always have to tune it for it not to get in my nerves.

Full hinting only looks good on CRTs. Can't even remember the last time I used one.

What? If you want perfectly sharp fonts, you need to disable antialiasing(it always blurs the edges) and enable full hinting. The problem is that only commercial fonts got hinting right, and all free fonts look ulgy and unreadable with those setting (but you can always use M$ web core fonts for free)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/truetype/hinting

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting

[Xaero_Vincent]

I noticed something interesting.

Not all version of Tahoma fonts are the same or render the same. Compare the tiny text of the Tahoma font (gotten from Wine project) versus the newer Tahoma font version from Windows 10.

Old Tahoma font extracted from Wine (6px looks terrible):


Now things are very interesting because in my opinion, the Windows 10 Tahoma font version looks BETTER under Linux than Windows with Pango 1.4.77 with slight hinting. Look how terrible Windows font engine renders it at 6px in Wordpad:

You'll want to right click and open the below image in a new tab to see the fonts clearer.

New Windows 10 font compared to rendering on Windows 10:

[angrypie]

So the real bug are copycat fonts with no hinting information?

[evil_core]

It is pretty explicitly does not include Tahoma.

RTFM! and stop spreading lies! (read NEWS, which is only 12 lines on main site)

According to this:

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Tahoma was removed for a while, and later included using other source (they are different revisions provided with different software by microsoft, with different licenses)

• 120909 Ouch, that was a few years. Due to the kind contributions of Deven T. Corzine we now have an updated (and working!) package again.
• 060430 A long awaited overhaul. Many things are fixed, links updated. Selects a random mirror. Uses tahoma from word 97 viewer instead of the ie6 update so no windows license is needed.
• 030331 Updated the package to match the new location of the Tahoma cab file on microsoft's download site
• 021108 Added link to suse adaption of the .spec file
• 021107 Updated the Tahoma font link, as Microsoft moved their file
• 021026 Removed the python hack as it rarlely needed anyway. That means that only the spec file is interesting nowdays. Updated misc other things as well.
• 021026 It seems like this page got linked. First The Register, then that article was linked from slashdot.
• 020827 A friendly soul over at Microsoft informed me that the Tahoma font was never a part of the "core fonts for the web" initiative and has unclear licensing, so I've removed it
• 020815 Microsoft pulls their fonts from their site. Fortunately, according to the End User License Agreement and the faq I have the right to redistribute the fonts in unaltered form. This right I intend to exercise.
• 020409 Installing doesn't work on 1.1-2. Fixed in 1.1-3
• 020312 Upgrading doesn't work on versions prior to 1.1-2. You will need to remove the old package with 'rpm -e' and than install the new one with 'rpm -i'.
• 020312 Version 1.1
  • cabextract is now in a separate package, so no gcc toolchain is needed to follow the instructions
  • The Tahoma font is included

[evil_core]

So the real bug are copycat fonts with no hinting information?

No(but in case of this screenshot, it is, but really it's not related to this article)
The problem is that they ignore hinting, because free fonts got broken or not hinting is not needed at all, and won't implement it as hinting is not so much needed for HiDPI screens.
Before they removed support for Type 1 Bitmap fonts, like Terminus, which is the mostly used bitmap font format by programmers / heavy terminal users.
So now you have to use blured (antialiased) crap, but it's much less visible on HiDPI screens.

[Volta]

Since I am the CTO on a software house, I was considering recently to replace some windows desktops with Linux on specific machines. Thank God I did not do this change, I should know better and now I do.

I wouldn't be thankful for stupidity, but it's up to you. It seems you have no clue about the issue, so I recommend to read the discussion under the bug report. Ps. the CEO without clue who sticks to spyware? That's a good one!

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/2394#issuecomment-626296018

Even a wealthy desktop-oriented software company like Microsoft has not finished converting all the Windows software universe to its own modern text engine. Scratch a little and you find the same pervasive use of several layers of legacy text libs with the associated rendering problems. Even a killer application like Microsoft Office still selects fonts the pre-2000 GDI RBBI way, aka the legacy OpenType Name ID 1 & 2 layer (at least we got that fixed in most Free Desktop apps). Microsoft, who wrote the OpenType spec that deprecated those, did not manage yet to apply its own spec to its own star product.

Ps. birdie

how do you feel with awareness your beloved X is in big part responsible for your crying?

When people started working on this free desktop side in the 2000’s, they quickly realised it just could not fit within the existing software architecture. They wasted around a decade trying to fit it in anyway, before taking radical decisions like killing X11 and agreeing to converge on a single set of text rendering libs (text rendering is what killed X11 in the first place, no video or 3D games or whatever).