Hey Carl, thanks to you! We come closer to the point---great! ;-)
I really enjoyed your detailed explanation. I did know before that hinting makes use of the knowledge where pixels are (to make antialiasing become less fuzzy) and subpixel hinting makes use of the fact that a pixel isn't a pixel but three of them (red, green, blue)---but nothing more. Although I had some signal processing courses at university and although I understand more about it after your description, I am still far from beeing a font rendering pro ;-). For example, I still do not get how the subpixel and hinting renderer knows, where the (sub-)pixels are. But this is no course in font rendering :) So please excuse, I didn't follow your links in detail. It is not a lack of interest but a lack of knowledge. But I hope I got the important points: > Then when you enable sub-pixel rendering, both applications start using > various colors on the edges of the glyphs. So it's not the case that > anything is simply ignoring your configuration. Now you mentioned it, I can see it. The thing that still confuses me is that both Konqueror and Iceweasel have colored edges in their window title font in withoutsubpixelhinting(hintmedium,nativ).png Okay. So there is a patch, which changes cairo to use the subpixel filtering of freetype instead of its own and it is this one proposed here http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10301 right? And my Debian version does not use it. Is this the patch applied to the Debian package by the Ubuntu guys (resulting in the font rendering I personally prefer)? http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/c/cairo/cairo_1.8.8-2ubuntu1.diff.gz http://packages.ubuntu.com/en/source/karmic/cairo Is it that what distinguishes the packages "cairo-lcd" and "cairo" in arch linux? http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#The_original_.22LCD.22_packages > Cairo does not currently use freetype to do the filtering. > I'm guessing that konqueror does, (but that's only a guess--- > Qt could be doing its own filtering as well). Yeah, I think that is what Qt=>4.5 does---at least if I parse http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/01/subpixel-antialiasing-on-x11/ correctly. To summarize: The behavior I reported is not directly a bug, but we have a typical feature vs. bug issue here, because it is a matter of taste which subpixel filter looks better: > I happen to be in the camp that really does prefer vertical stems > to be rendered as sharp as possible, (without blurring into > neighboring columns of pixels). Therefore I suggest: Would it be a possibilty to let users decide (either by a config option or by providing two different packages, as the arch linux people do---if it's that what they're doing)? Ok, as you say, it results in more (complicated) options: > I've personally been unwilling to add an option to cairo to control > sub-pixel filter until someone can propose names for the options > that actually map to differences the end user would like to effect. I completly understand that. Somehow, these Qt guys must have solved this problem as well---at least the selection of the subpixel filtering algorithm‽ Maybe it would be good to do it the same way‽ > Yes, this is "hinting style". And for this, I can see code very clearly > in cairo that reads these values from fontconfig and sets corresonding > options within freetype. See here for example: > > http://cgit.freedesktop.org/cairo/tree/src/cairo-ft-font.c?id=26e9f149063b9 > e1fdb54fc54fccbefdf04a68190#n1387 > > So I would be very surprised if this wasn't working. Yepp. It works perfectly AFAICS. Thanks again and kind reagrds, micu -- GnuPG: https://www1.inf.tu-dresden.de/~s3418892/micuintus.asc Fingerprint: 1A15 A480 1F8B 07F6 9D12 3426 CEFE 7455 E4CB 4E80 <<</>> https://wiki.c3d2.de/Benutzer:Micuintus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org