Bug 71336

Summary:	Badly distorted fonts when not using anti-aliasing
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Public Beta	Reporter:	Mark Round <mark>
Component:	freetype	Assignee:	Owen Taylor <otaylor>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	limbo
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
URL:	http://www.markround.com/files/snapshot3.png
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2002-08-12 13:51:18 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Mark Round 2002-08-12 13:51:13 UTC

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Description of problem:
If I use anti-aliasing, fonts appear smooth - but the
moment I turn this off, things get seriously ugly and unreadable - in KDE,GNOME,
Mozilla, and OpenOffice. 

I've got a 2 screen shots at
http://www.markround.com/files/snapshot3.png and snapshot1.png so you can see
what I mean. This is using Helvetica, but even after I install the scalable
MS TTF webfonts, I still get this problem. (IE:- Using "Arial" instead of
"Helvetica") The fonts are set to their default "point" size, and they still
look distorted.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Disable anti-aliasing in any dekstop environment.
2. Restart X in the case of KDE. It's immediate under GNOME.
3.
	

Actual Results:  The fonts changed form being easy to read and well-formed to
being seriously distorted and unreadable.

Expected Results:  The fonts should have remained readable and well-scaled.
Under RH7.3, without Anti-aliasing, fonts remain well defined and legible.

Additional info:

I've tried installing some nice TTF fonts, changing the order of the
fonts listed in /etc/X11/fs/config, altering my DPI settings - and
still no joy. What's interesting is that I got the same problem under another
distro (Mandrake 8.2) - but not on RH 7.3.

Reproduced on two different computers. One laptop with Trident Cyberblade and
Toshiba LCD (Satellite Pro 4600), and one desktop PC (nVidia GeForce MX ,
Samsung monitor)

Comment 1 Owen Taylor 2002-08-12 15:28:56 UTC

Good non-antialiased display of freetype fonts requires the use
of TrueType bytecode hints. See:

 http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

(see also the without_bytecode_interpreter define in the freetype
SRPM)