Created attachment 692576 [details] Screenshot of numbers rendered in XTerm with freemono font Description of problem: Immediately after upgrading to F18, the quality of freemono font was reduced noticeably. The same effects are seen in GNOME Terminal, Xfce Terminal, LX Terminal, and urxvt, although I mostly use XTerm. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: I cannot find a way to correct it. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install F18 2. Install XTerm 3. run xterm Actual results: The quality of fonts is not as good as it was in F17 Expected results: Same font rendering as F17 Additional info:
I'm not seeing the same rendering errors. Does it matter which desktop environment you run these applications? Can you reproduce this on another machine with different video hardware?
Okay, yes, I do see a difference on different hardware. I see the same trend on both my desktop and my netbook, but it is much more pronounced on my desktop. I upgraded my netbook first and immediately noticed a change in two places: 1) 's' appears slightly forward slanted, which i never noticed before. 2) '4' has a very thin left edge. I compared GNOME terminal and XTerm just to see if it was related to the application, but they looked about the same. And not really a problem. But, when I upgraded my desktop a week later, it was worse. It is unpleasant at font size less than 12 pt. I also noticed '2' and other number characters were particularly bad. I use Xfce on both systems, mostly. I will try with another environment soon. In the mean time, is there anything else I should check? What does this information suggest, so far?
Are the manufacturers of the video cards different?
Yes. Netbook: Intel N4xxx/N5xxx video adapter Desktop: ATi Radeon 4000 series (RV710/730) Thank you for your help Jon. I am still going to try GNOME, soon. But, again, does this suggest anything?
It just helps narrow down what component might actually be the cause. It's not the hardware, the X server, the video driver, and *probably* not gnu-free-fonts. It might be something Xfce-related, and trying GNOME will help figure that out.
Hmm. I was thinking the opposite, actually. It looks better on the netbook than my desktop, so perhaps it is hardware related. But, I have tried GNOME and LXDE desktops, too, now, and here are the results: gnome-terminal looks the same in all three desktops. The screen shots I took are indistinguishable. Though I maintain that it looks different than F17, I admit it is very hard to tell and I cannot be absolutely certain. xterm looks considerably different in the LXDE and GNOME desktops than the XFCE desktop. While the contrast is better in XFCE, the rendering errors I reported are present only in the XFCE screen shot. I will attach screen shots to this bug report for your viewing.
Created attachment 695937 [details] XTerm in GNOME desktop
Created attachment 695938 [details] gnome-terminal in GNOME desktop
Created attachment 695939 [details] XTerm in LXDE desktop
Created attachment 695940 [details] gnome-terminal in LXDE desktop
Created attachment 695941 [details] XTerm in XFCE desktop
Created attachment 695942 [details] gnome-terminal in XFCE desktop
Hmm. I'm reassigning this to xfwm, because I think that's probably the culprit, but I'm not an XFCE expert so it might not be quite right. Does it occur in the XFCE Terminal?
Hi. So, what do you have set in settings->appearence->fonts ? Does adjusting any of those settings change anything? I wonder if this couldn't be lower level... pango or cairo or something.
Jon, XFCE Terminal looks identical to GNOME Terminal in this regard (as far as I can tell). Kevin, Good question. I've been playing with that and here are the results: I have been using Enable anti-aliasing=true, hinting:full, and sub-pixel order=none for a couple years now. Today, I tried disabling anti-aliasing and adjusting the hinting and sub-pixel order. None of these options appear to have any effect on fonts rendered by XTerm. It looks the same no matter what I select and it's always anti-aliased. This surprised me at first, but fonts in X11 are so confusing that I don't know what to make of this. It's not specific to freemono, either; there is no effect in any font I choose. But, GNOME and XFCE Terminals are both strongly affected by all three settings. Obviously, disabling anti-aliasing has the largest effect. And, I think the aforementioned settings are still the best choice (at least on my hardware).
So, re-reading here.... The problem is only in xterm? The problem is only in Xfce? The problem is only with freemono?
Almost. UXRVT also shows the same rendering artifacts, so it's not just XTerm, exactly. I haven't tried other XTerm replacements. But, to be completely accurate, I think the change *is* visible even in GNOME Terminal and Xfce Terminal, it's just not nearly as bad. freemono is not even usable in XTerm anymore, but I'm not using it in GNOME Terminal any longer either. It's easiest to see in the "4" character. The leading edge is thinner than the other strokes in both XTerm and GNOME Terminal, but in XTerm, it's actually disappeared. Yes, I think it's only with Xfce. I actually tried LXDE and Openbox, too. But, also notice that GNOME Terminal looks the same in all desktops, which, as I say, is still slightly degraded as compared to F17. Now, I could be wrong; maybe it didn't change in GNOME Terminal, but I am almost certain it did; I noticed it immediately. I don't know if any other fonts are affected because, as you can tell, I've been using freemono almost exclusively for a few years. I have looked at DejaVu Sans Mono, Liberation Mono, and Nimus Mono; they all look fine to me, nothing like what happened to freemono, at least. But, I really wouldn't know if they have changed or not because I hardly ever look at them.
This is still the case with F19. However, I think I have another piece of the puzzle. This is only noticeable with font sizes <12pt, at least on my system. If I use 12pt or larger, then the thin edges are just thin, not missing or washed out as reported originally. CTRL-R-Click shows a list of standard(?) VT Font sizes in XTerm. So, the problem is not noticeable when using choices "small", "medium", "large", and "huge". (BTW, small and medium are the same for me, not sure why.) But, selecting "tiny" shows this problem very well. That's much smaller than 12pt, though, and the problem is still visible up to 11pt. It's conceivable that I only noticed this when I switched to 11pt or 10pt font as the default. That may have coincided with the upgrade to F18. If someone could try these small font sizes and confirm that the same thing problem occurs on their systems *and* that is expected at small sizes, I would be happy to close this bug as "not a bug".
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