FreeType Improvements For The Adobe Engine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeType Improvements For The Adobe Engine

With FreeType 2.8.1 having been released last week, a lot of new code landed in the early hours of today to its Git repository...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeType-Adobe-GSoC17

[RealNC]

With FreeType 2.8.1 having been released last week

Which completely broke font rendering in every other application, from Wine to Chrome and Thunderbird, text now has pixel garbage

[jrch2k8]

Which completely broke font rendering in every other application, from Wine to Chrome and Thunderbird, text now has pixel garbage

mmmm that didn't happen on ArchLinux for me with RadeonSI/AMDGPU and this morning I was curious so I builded from AUR the GIT version and still all look great.

Maybe your distro is passing an old configuration and breaking it? I remember arch news asked few weeks ago to make some changes maybe is related

[sdack]

Which completely broke font rendering in every other application, from Wine to Chrome and Thunderbird, text now has pixel garbage

This isn't true from what I can tell. I've got Freetype 2.8.1 three days ago and it runs just fine. There isn't a single problem to report.

Know that the freetype library can have an effect on running installations if you install it over a previous library. This is an old behaviour though. You may want to restart your desktop in this case.

[Hoshpak]

Perhaps that's just because the packages were patched before you received the update? My experience with this update (immediately after receiving the update, patches were applied in the meantime for most issues) on Void Linux so far war:

- Font rendering in Firefox: broken
- Font rendering in browsers based on qt-webengine: broken
- Font rendering in Thunderbird: broken
- Executing graphical applications with wine: broken
- Compilation of wine: broken

The issues with Mozilla products and the qt-webengine were actually caused by an old version of Google's skia library not playing nice with the new freetype version, patches are available. The skia version bundled with current Chromium versions is not affected, I don't know about Google Chrome, though. There were also reports of font rendering issues with Electron based applications which are seemingly based on an older Chromium version. For wine, I don't know of any workaround or fix yet, I just downgraded the 32bit freetype package to 2.8 until a fix is available.

[uid313]

Now if I can get some emojis.

I now have the emoji picker widget in GTK+ applications, but the emojis are black/white. No colors.

[sdack]

Perhaps that's just because the packages were patched before you received the update? ...

Not sure for whom you've intended your reply, but if it's for me then, no, I've compiled and installed it myself and all my software renders just fine.

It is a minor update after all and if it's causing you such major problems then chances are the source of these problems lies somewhere else.

[elvenbone]

I remember updating a few days ago, all text on webpages in Firefox suddenly disappeared.

Closing Firefox and opening it again fixed it.

[Hi-Angel]

Those 2.8.1 problems are actually not Freetype per se, but unpatched apps. I know because I've seen wine bugreports, and even reported bug in Firefox myself. In my case it was that I was forced to lock Firefox at older version, thus didn't receive the patched app.

[sdack]

Those 2.8.1 problems are actually not Freetype per se, but unpatched apps. I know because I've seen wine bugreports, and even reported bug in Firefox myself. In my case it was that I was forced to lock Firefox at older version, thus didn't receive the patched app.

Know you can change Freetype's run-time behaviour with an environment variable:

export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=40"

Other values are 35 and 38 for the previous interpreters. There are more, but you'd need to go through the documentation to find them all. See here.

Also Debian and likely many Debian-based distros can have their default hinting method altered system-wide by running (as root):

$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config