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

[pal666]

I hope people switch to a fork spawned before all of this nonsense went down.

everyone hopes that someone else will work for him for free

[pal666]

Attitudes like this is what pushed me back to Microsoft Windows & Apple on the desktop/mobile. I have work to do, don't have time coddling toxic free software egos that break or remove significant compatibility features simply because their narrow personal use doesn't include it.

moron, since when ms and apple products don't remove significant compatibility features?

[Xaero_Vincent]

moron, since when ms and apple products don't remove significant compatibility features?

Agreed just look at the dropped features from Windows and Mac OS X over the years on Wikipedia.

[pal666]

Other distros don't have to take the updates. If a fork of Pango without these changes becomes predominant, then maybe the trunk could become irrelevant.

but who will work on such fork? you? some other forum whiner? you can only whine

[Xaero_Vincent]

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.

At this point I think the subtle differences are subjective. The screen shot is from my 1080p screen (not HIDPI). Maybe some feature got removed when Pango switched to using HarfBuzz for a specific thing but I don't personally DONT think the Windows font rendering looks better. I only agreed originally because apparently the copy cat MS fonts offered by Wine don't provide hinting.

It's a trade off at best if you ask me. From the screenshot you can see super tiny 6 and 7px fonts look objectively worse under Windows while 8px is slightly sharper on Windows. However, I personally happen to think the anti-aliased look of the Win 10 Tahoma font on Linux at 8px looks good and even better than Windows. The anti-aliased look gives it a stronger contrast on a white word processor background, making it easier on the eyes to see while the 6px size on Windows looks like blurry crap.

Sure many can disagree with me, but lets face it's bullshit if you think this font looks horrendously worse under Linux.

[pal666]

The question is: has anyone noticed anything exceptionally relevant, absolutely necessary and brand new in Pango 1.44? No one that I know of

maybe you should know someone better?

. So, why go all the way to remove something which gave near perfect results and replace it with something which now requires the user to ... purchase a high DPI monitor not to bleed from their eyes?

because near perfect results exist only in your imagination

[pal666]

The font is fine as the bug affects many other fonts as well.

non sequitur. many other fonts aren't necessarily fine

Also, for some reasons FreeType v2 is able to work with such fonts just fine. Don't you find it somewhat weird?

i do. you are posting bullshit instead of writing code

Over the past 20 years Linux users have adapted to

now make same list for windows and macos users

the only thing that's happening is that people get fed up with this pace and move on to greener more stable pastures like ... Windows

no, moron, there's no your windows 7 pasture anymore, you can't move to it.

Over the past 10 years at least two of my friends have given up on Linux and switched to MacOS X full time

you aren't very lucky with friends.

"Too much tinkering with it [Linux]", they say.

they should've stopped tinkering and started using some real distro. now they can't even tinker, if something doesn't work, they either don't need it or are holding it wrong. btw, now they have "unusable" by your definition fonts, somehow they are usable for everyone but you

I will not adapt to blurry fonts. Period.

ms doesn't care and will not produce windows 7 for you anymore

[pal666]

Compatibility is paramount in proper software design.

font conversion tools are freely available to provide compatibility

[pal666]

Matthias Clasen, a pango developer who dropped FreeType kerning hints and switched to HarfBuzz for this purpose, remains silent.

maybe because his job is to write code, not chat with every crazy person?

[pal666]

why would you specifically want a curved one? what does it give besides a selling point?

color rendering of current monitor types changes with angle, curved monitors will have less angle variation, i.e. more uniform color rendering. that's the theory