Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

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I've found the font rendering to be very good indeed ever since the Truetype2 patent expired, so the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled.

I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all.

It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.

> the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled

Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?

The patents expired in 2010, and it should be enabled by default starting from Freetype 2.4. Microsofts patents on ClearType color filtering expired in 2019, but I don't know if that has led to any further improvements in Freetype.

https://freetype.org/patents.html

Make sure you don't have this in your fontconfig:

  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>

As the autohinter is garbage.

I'm running 1080p on a 23" screen (96 ppi) and I find Windows font rendering to be much better compared to Linux/Freetype on the same screen. Freetype suffers from intense blurring, colour bleed in subpixel smoothing and variable thicknesses both within glyphs and between two supposedly identical glyphs rendered next to each other.

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