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

[angrypie]

How are pango and cairo "unmaintained?" when they just had new releases? Does he mean "on life support?"

[birdie]

I feel like people here don't actually get what the division between HarfBuzz, Pango, and Freetype is...

HarfBuzz is the industry standard FOSS text shaping library, originally forked from FreeType and used on dozens of projects including all major web browsers. It in many ways is superior to freetype for rendering of Unicode characters and is not any sort of "trendy" library. FreeType shines when used for rendering instead, which is its primarily use nowadays.

In addition, you can't easily just fork a shaping library. This is a tremendously complex task (as is Unicode friendly text in general), and there's a reason everyone just uses HarfBuzz.

Why wasn't text shaping added straight to FreeType itself? It still renders pretty much everything as far as I can see.

[re:fi.64]

Why wasn't text shaping added straight to FreeType itself? It still renders pretty much everything as far as I can see.

Text shaping on its own is pretty complex, there's a good description here: http://behdad.org/text/

TLDR would be that FreeType didn't add it because it's not related to the rasterization itself. Rasterization is taking glyphs and actually rendering them, but shaping is the process of taking arbitrary Unicode text and finding what glyphs to use & where to put them.

[re:fi.64]

How are pango and cairo "unmaintained?" when they just had new releases? Does he mean "on life support?"

Until those recent releases, Pango was essentially unmaintained. Cairo still has releases but generally doesn't seem to be experiencing any major development work, which is part of the reason LibreOffice and Firefox both dropped it in favor of Skia.

[cynical]

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

Ubuntu is not a bitmap font, so who cares? Quite frankly, it’s strange to even talk about supporting old tech like this forever. Just use a newer font already, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of attractive modern options.

[Raka555]

Linux is clearly the wrong choice for many people.

I wish there were viable options ...

[mo0n_sniper]

I love Linux for it's simplicity and it's principles, but this is why proprietary software will always win, because they care for what the users want.
I've been using Linux for 15 years and I work as a system administrator for a big IT company but after using Linux on my PC for some periods in the past I have decided to use it only for my personal servers.

I don't want to become an Apple fanboy just to have a clear desktop on my 1,500 dollars PC laptop.
Yes, it's free software and people choose how they spend their time contributing, but if I don't like it I won't use it.

[Hans Bull]

"That's what we decided not to support anymore. You can try to get used to the "blurry" rendering. Or you can find something else to use, or whatever. You are using Free Software you realize, right?"

That sick, arrogant shit can only come from a facepuke employee

[Britoid]

Is Clasen a Red Hat paid employe? SO, what do you think he IS?

Clasen being Red Hat employee has zero relevence

[iznogood]

So regarding the desktop we have the same situation as many times, where developers don't care about the users.

The fact that the software is open source has nothing to do with it. The problem is that whomever decides on what to do or change on the software stack clearly has no idea about product development. Everything is about your users, if you don't care for them then the produce is dead. If the developer can not do a change then why start the project anyways?

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.