Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 71336
Badly distorted fonts when not using anti-aliasing
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:03 EDT
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)
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)