My system is FC6 upgraded from FC5 with apt. I know this isn't a supported method, so reject the bug if you wish, it's okay with me, I'll try to reproduce it on an Anaconda-upgraded system :) The problem will be illustrated using two screenshots of font selector from gnome-font-properties. Both show the default (!) test string for the Polish locale. As you will see, local characters being just a version of some latin char with a dot/acute/whatever, have different sizes. Only some of them are used in the preview text, but others are equally or even more (especially "ł") ugly. This happens to all the "sans" fonts except one (can't remember, which one; it was Nimbus or Luxi). Every GNOME program on my desktop uses those fonts, looking really, really bad. There are many fonts working with less problems, but it seems to me that every single one has some rendering problems resulting in differences between "A" and "Ą" (I'm typing this using standard "Monospace 10", where both letters are the same size, but there's an additional grey dot on top of "Ą"). The screenshots are made with freetype-2.2.1-10.fc6. This is what I get with FC6. Downgrading to FC5's freetype-2.1.10-5.2.1 seems to fix the issue.
Created attachment 139379 [details] demonstration of broken Sans Regular
Created attachment 139380 [details] demonstration of broken Sans Bold
A friend of mine confirms that the same happens with FC6 upgraded from FC5 with Anaconda. I'd be surprised if fresh installs were any better. Meanwhile I tried freetype from FC5 with BCI enabled and this one wins in every comparison (with "slight" hinting it looks marvelous). Rebuilding FC6's freetype with BCI doesn't change anything WRT my issues.
Is this the same bug as bug 210491?
I can't read greek, but after looking at the screenshots I think it may be a duplicate. Screenshots attached to bug 210491 show grey pixels above letters (which I was complaining about already) and the one linked from freedesktop.org's bugzilla shows different letter sizes in both bold and regular Sans. I'm now on the CC list of that bug, so you can safely mark this one as a duplicate and I'll scream loud if #210491's fix won't fix Polish installation.
Bug 212170 is along the same lines of breakage but for Cyrillic. Freetype 2.2.1 is just no good. Upstream developers claim that 2.2.2 will be much better. Here is their truly beautiful latest developments http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2006-11/msg00030.html
I have built and uploaded freetype-2.3.3 RPMS for Fedora Core 6. http://apodtele.googlepages.com/freetype-2.3.3-0.i386.rpm http://apodtele.googlepages.com/freetype-devel-2.3.3-0.i386.rpm http://apodtele.googlepages.com/freetype-demos-2.3.3-0.i386.rpm I will be wasting my web space for a month until May 5, 2007 unless there is an official update.
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