Hacker News Reader

Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

I think I am going to have to give Arch a try.

One thing that has kept me on Ubuntu family distros is font rendering. Ubuntu's patches for freetype, cairo, xft, etc are quite simply requirements for me for a desktop Linux.

Some distros have these by way of some guy maintaining his own set of patched packages. I have always been reluctant to rely on these.

I was thrilled when Linux Mint came out with Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is Debian + these font patches + some other Mint-y friendliness (but still mostly Debian).

The fact that Arch maintains the *-ubuntu family of patched packages means I just might consider using it, too.

View on HN

I always had the opposite experience with font rendering. I always have to disable all hinting and turn on subpixel rendering to get results I like, since I prefer thicker glyphs that have more consistent forms, kerning and spacing at all sizes, even in print (ala Mac OS X) rather than having glyphs that have been forced into pixel boundaries and smushed closer together at smaller sizes for maximum glyph readability (ala Windows).

To me, the spacing and kerning of the fonts matter much more than the clarity of the individual glyphs. Seeing letters smashed together or with wide gaps between letters drives me insane...

May I ask how subpixel smoothing is not a form of hinting?

How do you see it as a form of hinting unless we have different definitions of what hinting is?

As I would define it, hinting is the modification of the appearance of the font at smaller sizes, usually away from the actual outline design of the font and the original spacing, in order to make it fit into pixel boundaries for the purpose of clarity and readability. Used with subpixel rendering, you can get sharp, punchy text that is even more readable, but I wouldn't consider subpixel rendering by itself to be hinting.

If anything, unhinted subpixel rendering (where any auto-hinting has been disabled and all font hints are ignored) allows the font to look more like the intended outline design in spite of being rendered at a small size on a low resolution screen by boosting the horizontal resolution and interpolating the values between points where the outline crosses partial pixel boundaries. That is, it allows all the glyph metrics to remain intact at smaller sizes while improving readability, whereas the very notion of hinting implies that those properties have been intentionally modified for the purpose of readability.

It took me a while to get font rendering working the way I wanted in Arch, but it is possible (that's by way of encouragement... don't let this be a showstopper for you; I understand why it's important).

Infinality is great but even it requires some massaging to get it to the state I like (though of course now I have my configs pretty much ready to install off a repo).

Actually they aren't maintained by Arch, they are in AUR, and they are maintanied by an Arch user called Hador[1].

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?K=Hador&SeB=m

Reply on news.ycombinator.com