Qt5's Linux Requirements Cause Problems

[JS987]

Arial is only one font. And it sucks under Linux anyway. It's not meant for FreeType.

Arial works great under Linux same as other Microsoft fonts.

[JS987]

I don't have all fonts installed, but most of installed Microsoft fonts are displayed right.

[JS987]

Mind revealing the mysterious DE? "Steven Starr" isn't listed as an author at neither http://razor-qt.org/ nor http://www.maui-project.org/, and those are the only two emerging Qt DEs I'm aware of.

found Steven Starr and his DE http://code.google.com/p/zester/
found also discussion at qt-project.org http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/20363/

!!!!! Previous screenshot is displayed resized. It should be open in new tab to see it exactly !!!!!!

[Sidicas]

The "native" render engine might be faster, but it's buggy. Fonts don't render correctly (kerning seems to not be applied at all.)

Edit:
Some proof with screenshots. First, "native":

http://i50.tinypic.com/fwnksj.png

Then, "raster":

http://i50.tinypic.com/2yxm980.png

If you flip between the two, you will see that the "native" engine's font rendering is way off.

It looks to me that in your case, the raster is using Font-hinting and the "native" is using GPU hardware accelerated anti-aliasing without font hinting.

Of course, the correct thing to do is to use font-hinting everywhere, but it might not be possible due to driver and / or patent limitations. I don't think this is a real problem, as you should be able to turn on font-hinting in the "native" and get the both of best worlds.

Basically what you're showing is a performance vs. quality trade off... IMO, no surprise there.

However, I'm almost positive there are some configuration options you're overlooking that, *by default*, are likely different depending on which rendering you're doing (native vs. raster). (ie: Raster by default will likely choose maximum quality while native by default may choose maximum performance). I think it's just a default option you need to change in your font configurations.

Still, hopefully somebody more familiar with how Qt processes fonts will be able to answer this.

[RealNC]

I don't have all fonts installed, but most of installed Microsoft fonts are displayed right.

I don't see the point. Native is broken for other fonts, so it cannot be used. It doesn't matter that some fonts display OK.

[JS987]

I don't see the point. Native is broken for other fonts, so it cannot be used. It doesn't matter that some fonts display OK.

Broken fonts should be black listed.

[Sidicas]

I don't see the point. Native is broken for other fonts, so it cannot be used. It doesn't matter that some fonts display OK.

I'm pretty sure it's not broken, you just don't have it configured to use font-hinting... or perhaps for some reason when you're using "native" your graphics hardware isn't capable of using font-hinting.. who knows..

[RealNC]

Broken fonts should be black listed.

The fonts aren't broken. The Qt native renderer is.

And what do you think would happen if users wouldn't be able to use their fonts? They would switch to raster again.

[RealNC]

I'm pretty sure it's not broken, you just don't have it configured to use font-hinting... or perhaps for some reason when you're using "native" your graphics hardware isn't capable of using font-hinting.. who knows..

I'm not aware of any configuration option for this. Also, it happens with tho different GPUs and three different drivers:

NVidia GTX 560 Ti using official drivers, and AMD 4870 using Catalyst as well as the open source xf86-video-ati driver.

[JS987]

The fonts aren't broken. The Qt native renderer is.
And what do you think would happen if users wouldn't be able to use their fonts? They would switch to raster again.

There are enough fonts which are displayed right. There is no reason to use fonts which are displayed wrong.
6 times worse performance is unacceptable.