Improve Fedora's font rendering?

[DBelton]

my fonts are getting better and better

Spent this evening tweaking the Infinality settings, and fonts are looking pretty darn good now

Thanks for the work you put into hacking freetype, Infinality. I hope either more of your work gets put into freetype upstream, or they find other way to accomplish the same things.

[AdamW]

infinality: thanks for the info! afaict we don't do anything in the Fedora spec to disable "the default LCD filter" but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. There's no patch which looks like it does this, and nothing on the configure line. We don't change the default hinting option either AFAICT. But we do disable subpixel rendering due to patent issues, according to the spec.

[dd_wizard]

AdamW, when gnome-shell is first installed, the font hinting is medium, and the anti-aliasing is grey scale. I used gnome-tweak-tool to change it to Full and RGBa. Slight gives noticeable fuzziness in a terminal window, but I haven't decided if I like medium or full better.

dd_wizard

[oboedad55]

Originally Posted by Icedrake

That worked great, and holy cow, my fonts look so much better.

Yes, for me too. Thanks so much for the link! That was the one thing driving me crazy.

[Infinality]

Originally Posted by AdamW

infinality: thanks for the info! afaict we don't do anything in the Fedora spec to disable "the default LCD filter" but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. There's no patch which looks like it does this, and nothing on the configure line. We don't change the default hinting option either AFAICT. But we do disable subpixel rendering due to patent issues, according to the spec.

Hey there Adam,

Well, the default LCD filter is the same thing as "subpixel rendering".... kinda. It's subpixel rendering in the sense that it requires the glyph to be rendered in RGB format first. The filtering simply spreads out the intensities afterwards. According to freetype.org, all these patents have expired. There is no reason to disable anything in Fedora rpms, other than aesthetic (or lack thereof ) choices by packagers.

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Freetype's LCD filtering values are different than the MS ones, therefore the patent doesn't cover them. Subpixel rendering is prior art, and the patents for that are expired.

IMO, Fedora would gain a larger userbase if they made their fonts look nicer. (EDIT: I know RH has stated they don't care about desktop Linux, but it's clear that Fedora does to some extent. Since RHEL is for business, who cares what the fonts look like... But, I'll tell you that there is a relationship between knowing RHEL and Fedora, and it may draw more people into RHEL business if they are drawn into Fedora).

The top of the Fedora freetype.spec file has this:

# Patented subpixel rendering disabled by default.
# Pass '--with subpixel_rendering' on rpmbuild command-line to enable.
%{!?_with_subpixel_rendering: %{!?_without_subpixel_rendering: %define _without_subpixel_rendering --without-subpixel_rendering}}

So, this is disabled by default as you said. But I don't think it needs to be.

Nice font rendering is a much larger issue than either enabling or disabling this option, however enabling this by default, and using slight hinting by default would do absolute wonders to the font rendering of Fedora.

I don't know how much pull you have around RH, but maybe you could put in a good word for this?

---------- Post added at 11:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:05 PM ----------

Originally Posted by DBelton

Thanks for the work you put into hacking freetype, Infinality. I hope either more of your work gets put into freetype upstream, or they find other way to accomplish the same things.

Glad you like it. I started this mostly for my own sanity, but it's turned into something that other people are liking too.

Some of this will go to FT upstream, and the rest of it may eventually, in a slightly different form. It's doubtful that "they" would find another way to accomplish the same things, because AFAICT I'm the only person in the world that is hacking at Freetype like this, and in some sense, I know the most about doing that. Also, at this point, "they" is also "me" too, because I'm contributing to Freetype now.



---------- Post added at 11:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:15 PM ----------

For anyone interested, you can check out this page for setting up the Infinality patched Freetype on your Fedora system:

http://www.infinality.net/blog/infin...etype-patches/

I run Fedora, so I cater to packages that work on it. There are a couple issues with the recent packages I released, but I'm planning on updating soon. If you enable the Infinality repo you would get automatic updates. Still, know that much of this is beta software. However, even with its issues, it is in most cases significantly better than the default Fedora rendering, at least in my opinion.

[weitjong]

Hi Infinality. Just installed your newly released patchset (23 December 2011). It improves the font rendering greatly, previously I was just using the vanila F16 setting with Freetype-Freeworld installed. And more importantly I already like what I see out of the box without much tinkering on the infinality-settings.sh. Great job!

[viking777]

Thanks a lot Infinality those font packages make such a difference to the font rendering even without any extra configuration.

I don't know if it was my imagination or not but the font rendering seemed to deteriorate markedly after yesterdays (Dec24) update to the 3.1.6-1 kernel, although it may have been some package that came down with it I don't know for sure.

One thing I would point out - and this is probably my fault for not reading enough of Infinality's instructions - but I got the impression that I had to download the tarball and install from there, it wasn't until I had downloaded it and read the readme file that I found out I could install them through yum, which is obviously much simpler.

[Infinality]

Originally Posted by weitjong

Hi Infinality. Just installed your newly released patchset (23 December 2011). It improves the font rendering greatly, previously I was just using the vanila F16 setting with Freetype-Freeworld installed. And more importantly I already like what I see out of the box without much tinkering on the infinality-settings.sh. Great job!

Thanks... One of my considerations is to use settings that most people are probably going to like without needing to modify!

---------- Post added at 10:14 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:12 AM ----------

Originally Posted by viking777

Thanks a lot Infinality those font packages make such a difference to the font rendering even without any extra configuration.

I don't know if it was my imagination or not but the font rendering seemed to deteriorate markedly after yesterdays (Dec24) update to the 3.1.6-1 kernel, although it may have been some package that came down with it I don't know for sure.

One thing I would point out - and this is probably my fault for not reading enough of Infinality's instructions - but I got the impression that I had to download the tarball and install from there, it wasn't until I had downloaded it and read the readme file that I found out I could install them through yum, which is obviously much simpler.

Yes, I do have instructions the page for "Fedora Users":
http://www.infinality.net/blog/infin...etype-patches/

I have the latest kernel too, and I'm not seeing any issues on my end. If you want to come over to the forum and describe the problem in more detail, along with screenshots, someone will likely be able to help you!

[DBelton]

The latest updates to the infinality package really improved things from the previous release.

The default settings seem to work great for me now, were before I had to go in and tweak a few things to get them looking good.


However, I am having an issue with fonts in KDE and qt apps. I don't think it's an issue with infinality, though. I really think it's more the window drawing than the fonts, too. It's like it's just not giving the fonts enough space, and covering over them with the window. (This has been happening since before the update this past week, so that had nothing to do with it)

[weitjong]

Hi Infinality. Thanks for keeping up the good work. I see the new 2.4.9 is just out, however, I am not able to update the package due to a dependency issue.

[weitjong@igloo ~]$ op yum update
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package freetype-infinality.x86_64 0:2.4.8-1.20111223_2.fc16 will be updated
---> Package freetype-infinality.x86_64 0:2.4.9-1.20120403_02.fc16 will be an update
--> Processing Conflict: freetype-infinality-2.4.9-1.20120403_02.fc16.x86_64 conflicts freetype-freeworld
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: freetype-infinality conflicts with freetype-freeworld-2.4.6-4.fc16.x86_64
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I wonder is it safe to simply ignore the dependency error and do a force nodeps update via rpm?

[oboedad55]

Originally Posted by weitjong

Hi Infinality. Thanks for keeping up the good work. I see the new 2.4.9 is just out, however, I am not able to update the package due to a dependency issue.

[weitjong@igloo ~]$ op yum update
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package freetype-infinality.x86_64 0:2.4.8-1.20111223_2.fc16 will be updated
---> Package freetype-infinality.x86_64 0:2.4.9-1.20120403_02.fc16 will be an update
--> Processing Conflict: freetype-infinality-2.4.9-1.20120403_02.fc16.x86_64 conflicts freetype-freeworld
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: freetype-infinality conflicts with freetype-freeworld-2.4.6-4.fc16.x86_64
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I wonder is it safe to simply ignore the dependency error and do a force nodeps update via rpm?

I removed freetype-freeworld, reran the update and all seems well.

[blueflame]

This really helped me on my laptop and desktop:

http://blog.andreas-haerter.com/2011...ke-sharp-fonts

[mps2006]

Hi,

I've installed infinality, and most fonts look much better. I made .fonts.conf immutable etc as suggested on the infinality site. However, I now find that the fonts for QT apps (clementine, skype etc) are tiny compared to the gtk/gnome apps (i'm running gnome 3 on F16). Any idea how to fix that?
thanks
M.

[mkruger]

Just discovered the Infinality font rendering patches myself.

Fedora no longer looks like crap. Instead, it actually looks fantastic! And that's just with the default settings.

This is at least as good (if not better) than Ubuntu/Mint fonts. Maybe even as good as Windows.

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by blueflame

This really helped me on my laptop and desktop:

http://blog.andreas-haerter.com/2011...ke-sharp-fonts

Yeah, those settings combined with the freetype-freeworld package make the fonts on my Fedora systems look great. I actually prefer it over the infinality packages, which always make some of the fonts really small (and make my eyes hurt looking at them for too long).