X11 fonts and hinting

[Ethan Burns]

Hi,

I've been trying out some TTF fonts in acme on Linux. I like acme's default font, Lucida Sans, so I grabbed a TTF of it. When I set the font to '/mnt/font/Lucida Sans Regular/11a/font' it looks pretty bad. With a bit of trial and error I found that it can be much improved by disabling hinting in src/cmd/fontsrv/x11.c.

I attached an image showing the differences. I refer to them from top down:

• The first screenshot shows acme's default, bit mapped version.
  
• The second shows the font using the hinting from the TTF. This is the default from fontsrv. The glyphs are way too fine; it just looks silly.
• The third shows the font with freetype's auto hinting (FT_LOAD_FORCE_AUTOHINT). It looks a lot better. However, the semicolon and colon are still too light which is bad when looking at code. Also, the capital B and the dollar sign look slightly malformed. I didn't include it in the screenshot, but the kerning seems off too. For example, the 's' and 't' in the word 'const' are too far apart.
  
• The fourth shows the font with hinting disabled (FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING). In my opinion, this looks best. The glyphs are not too thin, B and $ do not look malformed, and 'const' is much better.

Any interest in making this the default?

Ethan

[Jaime Silvela]

Nice! I've also noticed that FC hinting was screwing with some fonts (notably Fira Sans) - even out of Acme, in Xfce.
I'd like to test your fix. Do you have it in some repository, or do you have a diff available?

Best,

Jaime

[Ethan Burns]

Hi Jaime,

Sorry, I didn't see your question until just now.

For some reason it didn't show up in groups until today.

It's probably easier to apply the change manually.

Just add FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING to

the FT_Load_Char call in cmd/src/fontsrv/x11.c.

Here's the diff:

--- a/src/cmd/fontsrv/x11.c Fri Mar 14 10:10:20 2014 -0400

+++ b/src/cmd/fontsrv/x11.c Fri Nov 14 10:00:55 2014 -0500

@@ -182,7 +182,7 @@

 

  memfillcolor(mc, DBlack);

 

- e = FT_Load_Char(face, i, FT_LOAD_RENDER|(antialias ? 0:FT_LOAD_TARGET_MONO));

+ e = FT_Load_Char(face, i, FT_LOAD_RENDER|FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING|(antialias ? 0:FT_LOAD_TARGET_MONO));

  if(e){

  fprint(2, "FT_Load_Char failed for %d\n", i);

  //mempoly(mc, rect_points, 4, Endsquare, Endsquare, 0, memopaque, ZP, S);

[Jaime Silvela]

Thanks Ethan, I've tried the fix, and it makes a substantial difference!

BTW the reason you got my message days later than I had written it is that my membership to the list was still pending.

Best,

Jaime

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[Ethan Burns]

I made a PR for this: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/pull/7.