Bug 71336 - Badly distorted fonts when not using anti-aliasing
Summary: Badly distorted fonts when not using anti-aliasing
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Public Beta
Classification: Retired
Component: freetype
Version: limbo
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Owen Taylor
QA Contact:
URL: http://www.markround.com/files/snapsh...
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-08-12 13:51 UTC by Mark Round
Modified: 2008-05-01 15:38 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2002-08-12 13:51:18 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Mark Round 2002-08-12 13:51:13 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1a)
Gecko/20020611 MultiZilla/v1.1.15

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)



Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.