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

[birdie]

Reading your bug report, the main issues are the fonts themselves which needed update to properly support HiDPI. Are you willing to do the task i.e. converting these bitmap fonts to freetype2 thus adhering to modern standard instead of legacy way? The sources are available to start the project.
Remember the world is in constant change and all we can do is adapt.

The font is fine as the bug affects many other fonts as well. Also, for some reasons FreeType v2 is able to work with such fonts just fine. Don't you find it somewhat weird?

Over the past 20 years Linux users have adapted to

1) OSS -> ALSA -> Pulse Audio (soon to be replaced as well)
3) HAL -> DeviceKit -> udev
3) Gnome 2->3 (GTK1->3)
4) KDE2->5 (Qt3->5)
5) SysVinit -> Upstart -> systemd
6) Xorg -> Wayland (with a ton of breakage)
etc. etc. etc.

There's just too much adaptation going on all the time. You do not win users this way - 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 and MacOS X. Over the past 10 years at least two of my friends have given up on Linux and switched to MacOS X full time, "Too much tinkering with it [Linux]", they say. "There are better things to do with your spare life", they add.

The bigger issue however is that I can adapt to pretty much anything. I will not adapt to blurry fonts. Period.

[markg85]

Linux is clearly the wrong choice for many people.

It definitely is for you with that attitude.

[antonyshen]

Ubuntu 20.10 is happily using Pango 1.44.7 with the issue which we're all discussing here.

Just did a quick check it's pango was linked with both freetype2 and harfbuzz; cann't it take advantage of the freetype engine given it's still there?

[franglais125]

The font is fine as the bug affects many other fonts as well. Also, for some reasons FreeType v2 is able to work with such fonts just fine. Don't you find it somewhat weird?

[...]

The bigger issue however is that I can adapt to pretty much anything. I will not adapt to blurry fonts. Period.

One friendly suggestion: perhaps you can switch to another font? I don't mean to be dismissive, but it can indeed alleviate the pain for now...

As for a reason why FreeType is being dropped, which you ask for in many places, at least one can be found in the article by Matthias that was referenced to you:

Stop using freetype

Freetypes FT_Face object has locking semantics that are broken and hard to work with; they are constantly getting in the way as we are juggling hb_fonts, FT_Face and cairo scaled font objects.

We’ve concluded that the best way forward is to stop using freetype for font loading or accessing font and glyph metrics. We can use Harfbuzz for all of these (a small gap will be closed soon).

Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts. We think this is an acceptable trade-off, but others might disagree. Note that Harfbuzz does support loading bitmap-only OpenType fonts.

Cheers,
A happy Pango 1.44 user, (using default fonts)

Source: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019...re-directions/

[tildearrow]

Reading your bug report, the main issues are the fonts themselves which needed update to properly support HiDPI. Are you willing to do the task i.e. converting these bitmap fonts to freetype2 thus adhering to modern standard instead of legacy way? The sources are available to start the project.
Remember the world is in constant change and all we can do is adapt.

Compatibility is paramount in proper software design.

[birdie]

Cheers,
A happy Pango 1.44 user, (using default fonts)

Source: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019...re-directions/

I prefer my fonts thank you very much :-) Maybe I'll try new fonts in the future but so far I've been fully content with what I have.

As for the decision to drop FreeType - this has already been discussed here on Phoronix: instead of fixing FreeType or working with them, Gnome/RH developers decided to switch to something new which is not always better. Also, they are still using FreeType for glyphs rendering (and I'm pretty sure it'll be this way going forward as no one is seriously proposing to create a new font renderer for Linux), just not the parts of it they don't like.

[tildearrow]

The font is fine as the bug affects many other fonts as well. Also, for some reasons FreeType v2 is able to work with such fonts just fine. Don't you find it somewhat weird?

Over the past 20 years Linux users have adapted to

1) OSS -> ALSA -> Pulse Audio (soon to be replaced as well)
3) HAL -> DeviceKit -> udev
3) Gnome 2->3 (GTK1->3)
4) KDE2->5 (Qt3->5)
5) SysVinit -> Upstart -> systemd
6) Xorg -> Wayland (with a ton of breakage)
etc. etc. etc.

There's just too much adaptation going on all the time. You do not win users this way - 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 and MacOS X. Over the past 10 years at least two of my friends have given up on Linux and switched to MacOS X full time, "Too much tinkering with it [Linux]", they say. "There are better things to do with your spare life", they add.

The bigger issue however is that I can adapt to pretty much anything. I will not adapt to blurry fonts. Period.

Nitpick: 6) XFree86 -> X.Org -> Wayland (breakage)

[tildearrow]

I prefer my fonts thank you very much :-) Maybe I'll try new fonts in the future but so far I've been fully content with what I have.

As for the decision to drop FreeType - this has already been discussed here on Phoronix: instead of fixing FreeType or working with them, Gnome/RH developers decided to switch to something new which is not always better. Also, they are still using FreeType for glyphs rendering (and I'm pretty sure it'll be this way going forward as no one is seriously proposing to create a new font renderer for Linux), just not the parts of it they don't like.

Drop FreeType?! WHAT?!

[franglais125]

this has already been discussed here on Phoronix

You mean in this thread, or elsewhere? Do you have a link for me to read?

Also, they are still using FreeType for glyphs rendering (and I'm pretty sure it'll be this way going forward as no one is seriously proposing to create a new font renderer for Linux), just not the parts of it they don't like.

I don't really follow this. Perhaps I'm simply not that much into fonts...

[zerothruster]

I seem to be missing something here, because I'm using 1.44.7 on my systems (variously xfce on this laptop, icewm on my desktops, and fluxbox for the initial WM when I'm bringing up a new build (linuxfromscratch). And no problems with the fonts I choose to use, except that on one monitor they tend to be a bit faint - I put that down to a cheap monitor which lacks sensible control settings.

But I dropped MS fonts years ago, and bitmap - typically I use Liberation, but with FreeSans as a fallback for some uncommon glyphs, usually Tex Gyre Heros, and DejaVu as the ultimate fallback.
For some other writing systems I add other fonts so that I can render them in mail, even if I can't read them - typically WenQuanYi Zen Hei, maybe some japanese or korean fonts.

And I certainly have no interest in High DPI monitors.

I will mention that various distros may do some apparently odd things in setting up fontconfig (e.g. Chrome OS prefers libre variants of Times/Arial/Courier and then prefers Noto and the Noto variants for other scripts - seems sane, but a long way away from the default of "eventually fall back to DejaVu Sans (or else Bitstream Vera) without ever using Noto unless it is the only font which contains a particular glyph".

Oh, and while on the laptop with xfce I use fontconfig, on the desktops I almost always use rxvt-unicode as my terminal (obviously, my browsers use fontconfig)ttps://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/how-fast-are-your-disks-find-out-the-open-source-way-with-fio/ and for that I have to specify a list of fonts - unlike the rxvt-unicode developers, I find no use for bitmap, and I can render almost everything that I receive in email or in spam (even georgian, I had a spate of that a little while ago).

Perhaps people chose fonts years ago, and then figured they'd made their choice and they should never again look at possibly using different fonts ?

OTOH, some of it might be down to eyesight variations - apparently some people can see individual coloured pixels in some hinting (e.g. red when the text is grey).ttps://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/how-fast-are-your-disks-find-out-the-open-source-way-with-fio/