Comments on: Ubuntu, Font Hinting, & You: A Cautionary Tale

By: Insanity « Igor's Blog

Insanity « Igor's Blog — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:44:50 +0000

[…] number of articles, forum posts and standard proposals definitely proves […]

By: Web Typography in Ubuntu: Part 1 · kbps

Web Typography in Ubuntu: Part 1 · kbps — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:32:54 +0000

[…] also want to stress that this is not a matter of personal preference; unlike my insistence upon no hinting — which I admit was subjective, but which I played up for effect — these […]

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:09:42 +0000

:SHAKES FIST:

By: walley

walley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:26:33 +0000

fullhintig and antialias off is the way to go!:)

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:05:08 +0000

Good question, bluegeek. ~/.fonts.conf is processed after the GNOME font settings, thus taking precedence over them. So nothing should be affected by the GNOME font settings.

By: bluegeek

bluegeek — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:25:05 +0000

How the gnome fonts settings interact with the fonts.conf settings? which one prevails? do I have to reset the gnome font settings?

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:57:09 +0000

Do not listen to this man! He means to deceive you!

@Bath: Actually, choosing “None” in the hinting section of font appearances doesn’t truly remove hinting, it only reduces it to slight. Weird, huh?

By: Disciple of "Bob"

Disciple of "Bob" — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:43:12 +0000

These instructions are fantastic if you enjoy text that looks like it was written on a paper towel with a felt tip pen. If, on the other hand, you actually read text and don’t just consider it decoration, you’ll want to skip this and let the “crispness” win out over the “aesthetics” that gives the author the vapours.

By: bath

bath — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:51:18 +0000

As someone who cares a lot about font display and typography in general I sympathize with these frustrations, but I’m pretty sure nothing was done by editing the font config file that isn’t easier for most users to accomplish through the Appearance Preferences GUI (Fonts tab … but then click ‘details’).

The effectiveness of subpixel rendering varies depending on the monitor and, to some extent, the way the font happens to line up against the pixel grid. On both of my computers, it works beautifully, a major boost to the horizontal resolution. I’ve seen that headache-inducing aura on some screens, but people who complain that subpixel rendering is unequivocally a nuisance should consider that their hardware may not represent the typical experience (i.e., no, your eyes aren’t more sensitive than ours). (Disclaimer: I don’t mean to suggest the author thinks this.)

I find myself occasionally switching between no-hinting and slight-hinting. Neither is quite right. What would be great (for subpixel users anyway) would be something like “vertical hinting only.” Using slightly larger font sizes than is standard can make things look a whole lot better, if you’re willing to adjust to it. The more recent MS fonts are of excellent quality and carry over beautifully.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:42:35 +0000

Nice! I find font hinting (on both Windows and Ubuntu) so bad that sometimes I struggle to determine whether a space is an inter-character space as opposed to an inter-word space.

The other major rendering issue is the lack of gamma correction. (I imagine using a decoding gamma of 2.5, blending and re-encoding with gamma=1/2.5 should work well, since font rendering is not subject to the rendering intent of the encoding gamma of 1/2.2 for images view in dim surroundings.)

As it is, font stroke weights vary according to their orientation and position. It’s hard to tell what is meant to be bold and what is not. Sometimes in order read a bit of text I have to make a screen snapshot and apply the correction in Photoshop myself (mainly with Adobe’s Acrobat Reader). A black vertical line one pixel wide exactly centred on the boundary of two adjacent pixel columns should have values RGB(193,193,193) in each column.

Obviously this will lighten the overall text somewhat. That’s because the font weight was chosen to look as best as possible on rendering systems with no gamma correction.

It’s kinda odd that most people don’t realise they are working with compressed images. (They are gamma-compressed.) All image arithmetic — scaling, blending, dithering and transparency handling — needs to be done with uncompressed images.