KDE Plasma Now Uses Slight RGB Hinting By Default For Better Fonts

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma Now Uses Slight RGB Hinting By Default For Better Fonts

KDE developers were busy as ever as they closed out their work in May on prepping KDE Plasma 5.16 and other improvements to KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-2-June-2019

[Compartmentalisation]

"Various font display improvements, including slight RGB hinting being on by default."

As opposed to what? Is the default none, or full now?

Slight is a good compromise, because then it's not too aggressive with autohinted fonts or poorly hinted fonts, and works perhaps a little nicer with non-Latin characters too.

[qlum]

The default was to leave it up to the distro to decide what they want to use. I am guessing if the distro never bothered to set it up it would be off?

[carewolf]

Wait, what? How can KDE change the hinting default, they were folloing SYSTEM defaults. And most distros have slight hinting as the default anyway..

Do they mean to ignore system defaults? I hope not..

Edit: So they are overriding "defaults" https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389598 , but ehmm... The GNOME2 defaults from Xft, not the system defaults from fontconfig...No, idea what the consequences of that might be.. Depends on whether it comes before or after reading the real defaults.

[carewolf]

The default was to leave it up to the distro to decide what they want to use. I am guessing if the distro never bothered to set it up it would be off?

You typically don't force RGB hinting by default, since some for screens, rotated desktop screens, TV, tablets etc, it would be wrong and look terrible.

[OlafLostViking]

You typically don't force RGB hinting by default, since some for screens, rotated desktop screens, TV, tablets etc, it would be wrong and look terrible.

I have a laptop screen, a horizontal and a vertical monitor at my desk. Mh, let's see if Plasma will identify this as a problem (kscreen is even used for rotating) and turn off hinting (or use different settings per monitor).

[schmidtbag]

Although I see the benefit of the new Dolphin behavior, will there be a way to disable it? I don't see where you can enable it now.

[Vistaus]

Full is slightly better readable to me, but as long as I can still change it to full, then I don't care what they want to default to.

[RealNC]

"The Dolphin file manager when already running and is called upon to display a new folder, it will do so in a new tab rather than new window."

Please no. I hope this can be disabled.

[shmerl]

Hm. I'm still waiting for this to be fixed:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313

https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530

Looks like all movement has stopped on that.