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

[Xaero_Vincent]

To quote myself, "I'm literally crying and shivering right now". I've always thought of myself as a really invested and rational Open Source lover and the net result is, "If it's free, you have to eat crap or beat it". I've had a lot of ups and downs in regard to Linux progress over the past +20 years but this day is by far the worst by a large margin.

Birdie,

I agree the Tahoma font as rendered with the newest Pango & Cairo doesn't have good kerning at small font sizes, some of the letters look squished together. Furthermore at small font sizes they look like crap without proper anti-aliasing. However, I did discover a font that looks nearly identical to Tahoma and renders pretty decently IMO. DejaVu Sans Condensed. The Condensed version is what makes it closer to looking like Tahoma IMO (just slightly wider spaced at very large font size) and small font sizes look much cleaner and readable.

[birdie]

What do you expect him to answer?

I don't know. Maybe close the bug report as WONFIX with a tiny explanation as to why the decision was made and why nothing can be done about it. I don't ask for much. I'm also quite patient usually but this bug report has now been opened for almost two months, he has been making changes to the code in the meantime, he has been specifically mentioned four times (i.e. he's received four email notifications) and still zero attention has been given. Maybe the guy is so incredibly busy he has chosen to address the bug later but in this case he could have dropped this line, "Sorry, I'm busy, I'll reply to the issue later".

[jrch2k8]

is this only with certain monitors? cuz honestly my SF Pro apple fonts render look beautifully in the latest gnome(archlinux) and the other metric of TTF i have around look great as well on my IPS 1080p monitor. honestly didn't even realize this was an issue

[franglais125]

Matthias Clasen [...] remains silent.

Respectfully: he already answered your question in two blog posts. I think you simply don't like the answer.

[mos87]

I don't know. Maybe close the bug report as WONFIX with a tiny explanation as to why the decision was made and why nothing can be done about it. I don't ask for much. I'm also quite patient usually but this bug report has now been opened for almost two months, he has been making changes to the code in the meantime, he has been specifically mentioned four times (i.e. he's received four email notifications) and still zero attention has been given. Maybe the guy is so incredibly busy he has chosen to address the bug later but in this case he could have dropped this line, "Sorry, I'm busy, I'll reply to the issue later".

well if you have been following the links around he wasn't exactly silent on the issue - starting from months ago e.g. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/404 and the follow-ups.

also, I'd heed this polite and concise advice - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango...63#note_794977

[angrypie]

you clearly haven't seen how it looks then.
also windoze font rendering is not only about a certain hinting algo - I'd suppose there's much more work put into it than just that.
To make win fonts look, yeah nice on a wide range of devices/sizes/resolutions. It's hard you know.

Do you have anything to back that up or you'll keep talking out of your ass?

[mos87]

Do you have anything to back that up or you'll keep talking out of your ass?

get closer I'll shout in your face

[birdie]

well if you have been following the links around he wasn't exactly silent on the issue - starting from months ago e.g. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/404 and the follow-ups.

also, I'd heed this polite and concise advice - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango...63#note_794977

Setting hintstyle per font family is not an issue for me but most average people would prefer not to dig this deep into making everything work out of the box like it works in less advanced OSes like Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. I haven't heard people using these OSes configuring font settings ever. In my rather primitive world I should not be using ~/.fonts.conf (nowadays ~/config/fontconfig/fonts.conf) at all but I don't have this luxury in Linux. Without it, fonts turn into something quite repulsive.

Of course Ubuntu has "solved" the issue by making users use some exact fonts they are given but once you need to work with other fonts, Ubuntu defaults break apart.

[mos87]

I don't know. Maybe close the bug report as WONFIX with a tiny explanation as to why the decision was made and why nothing can be done about it. I don't ask for much. I'm also quite patient usually but this bug report has now been opened for almost two months, he has been making changes to the code in the meantime, he has been specifically mentioned four times (i.e. he's received four email notifications) and still zero attention has been given. Maybe the guy is so incredibly busy he has chosen to address the bug later but in this case he could have dropped this line, "Sorry, I'm busy, I'll reply to the issue later".

again when I look on the screenshots ppl who complain about this issue post here https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/404 which show the "before" rendering I find them pretty much as ugly as the "after" ones (those taken using the "broken" 1.44 pango). Blurry at best.

[mos87]

Setting hintstyle per font family is not an issue for me but most average people would prefer not to dig this deep into making everything work out of the box like it works in less advanced OSes like Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. I haven't heard people using these OSes configuring font settings ever. In my rather primitive world I should not be using ~/.fonts.conf (nowadays ~/config/fontconfig/fonts.conf) at all but I don't have this luxury in Linux. Without it, fonts turn into something quite repulsive.

as I've mentioned on the opennet discussion - I gave up fiddling with it for years now. Granted I gave up on trying to use the fonts intentionally developed and geared for an alien rendering system as well. Can't quite understand why are you so clinging to M$ ttfs and stuff. Let go man. Droid/Ubuntu fonts have looked satisfactory for some time IMO