Fedora 34 Will See HarfBuzz-Enabled FreeType As The Latest For This Huge Feature Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 34 Will See HarfBuzz-Enabled FreeType As The Latest For This Huge Feature Release

The plan for Fedora 34 to improve font rendering by enabling HarfBuzz in FreeType was approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-34-HarfBuzz-FreeType-Go

[DKJones]

Font rendering has always been one of my biggest complaints about Fedora. This is great news.

[bug77]

I would really like to see an article on "better font rendering". What those techniques do is approximate the output, because the real output looks jaggy. Whether one approximation is better than the next one, I expect will vary from person to person. Honestly, I have asked before people why they don't like how a particular font looks like and the most common response was not about (lack of) jaggies, but "it doesn't look like Windows".

[pkunk]

HarfBuzz is not about "font rendering" it is about glyph positioning. Not a very big deal for European languages.
https://harfbuzz.github.io/what-is-h...s-text-shaping

[ehansin]

Text and typography have also been a sore spot with me an Linux. Often the fonts just look janky to me, though I could also suffer from the "they do not look like Windows" bias. On a stylistic front, I do not like the workflow for the most part that I get with macOS, but when they jumped from 10.9 to 10.10, I felt the later looked a lot nicer. I often think one of Linux desktop shortcoming is just little stylistic things.

On the Fedora front, I am looking forward to 34. I was running Arch, but spent a lot of time customizing things (which is not bad, and a great way to learn), but decided to start running Fedora as we use RHEL at work and I wanted my Linux boot to be more of a development environment.

[Vistaus]

Text and typography have also been a sore spot with me an Linux. Often the fonts just look janky to me, though I could also suffer from the "they do not look like Windows" bias.

For me it depends on the toolkit. GTK DE's and apps look off and often don't respect my font settings, no matter how much I tweak. Qt DE's and apps, on the other hand, always look crisp to me and respect my font settings.

[MadeUpName]

I have never noticed any issues with fonts in KDE other than their size when I switched to a 4K monitor. But then again if they are wrong I have no way of knowing what they are supposed to look like.

[ezst036]

Font rendering has always been one of my biggest complaints about Fedora. This is great news.

I agree that this is great news since I have heard for years about how bad fonts are in Linux. I never understood it and I don't see it but I have seen this complaint so many times that I'm glad it is being acknowledged and work is being done to correct it.

[M@GOid]

Font rendering is one thing Canonical did right with Ubuntu. Their font set makes Windows font look like shit. Since I use Kubuntu/Neon, I always change to their font in the preferences.

[ehansin]

For me it depends on the toolkit. GTK DE's and apps look off and often don't respect my font settings, no matter how much I tweak. Qt DE's and apps, on the other hand, always look crisp to me and respect my font settings.

I have never noticed any issues with fonts in KDE other than their size when I switched to a 4K monitor. But then again if they are wrong I have no way of knowing what they are supposed to look like.

Yeah, when I have installed KDE, I thought the fonts were pretty good. Since we are talking about KDE, I will say I got turned of how it seemed to "pollute" the root of "~/.config" for me. It seemed to me they could have created a folder or two in the root (KDE5 + ??) and then "namespace" things a bit. At least that was my thought. Turned me off to be honest. But fonts were great!