Bug 251157

Screenshot? Everything looks ok to me on factory.  Maybe the hinting issue?

Yes, two screen shots for comparison please.

If you have a ~/.fonts.conf file, please attach that as well.

Sorry guys, the screenshots should have been attached with the creation of this bug. Not sure what happened.

I don't have a ~/.fonts.conf file on either SLED or 10.3.

The fonts are equally bad on both my laptop and my desktop machine. Both are using LCD monitors.

Created attachment 133917 [details]
10.3A3 screenshot

Created attachment 133918 [details]
SLED10SP1RC2 screenshot

The fonts in the "Application Browser", the Desktop icons, the menu of
the gnome-terminal and the window titles seems to be "Albany AMT" in
both cases (i.e. the "agfa-fonts" package is installed, right?).

The fonts in the SLED10SP1RC2 are far more blurred I like the crisp,
high contrast fonts in the 10.3A3 screenshot much better.

The difference seems to be the use of the autohinter versus the
bytecode interpreter.

In SLES10/SLED10/10.1, the autohinter was used by default for all
fonts.  Since openSUSE 10.2, the autohinter is switched off by default
for most fonts to make use of the byte code instructions. You can see
that by comparing /etc/fonts/suse-hinting.conf in both versions.

Using the autohinter for high quality fonts like the agfa-fonts or the
DejaVu fonts which have very good byte code instructions is a waste.
It discards all the effort which went into the byte code to achieve a
very clear, non-blurred, high contrast rendering.

If you want to use the autohinter, just create a ~/.fonts.conf
with the following contents:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <fontconfig>

     <match target="font" >
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
       <bool>false</bool>
      </edit>
     </match>

    </fontconfig>

The font *in* the gnome-terminal is a completely different font and therefore
difficult to compare.

In the SLED10SP1RC2 screenshot it looks like "Cumberland AMT".  I'm
not sure what we see in the 10.3A3 screen shot.  Is this "DejaVu Sans
Mono" in "Bold"?? Looks ugly. I think the non-bold version is better.

There's another thing in the 10.3A3 screen shot of gnome-terminal
which I don't understand. The first prompt and the second prompt look
very different. How is that possible?

In reply to comment#6;
Yes, the agfa-fonts are installed.

Not sure how to explain this...
The font is not readable unless you look straight at it. If you look at it a bit from the side, you can no longer say that it is sharp and crisp. It looks to me as if the font is simply to "thin".

Also, I tried to create the .fonts.conf but it did not make a difference (at least not visible to me):-/

In reply to comment#7;
Good catch! Didn't even notice that myself. Tried to reproduce it just now but without success. Even looked at the history and run all the commands from history but didn't get that "problem" again.

> Also, I tried to create the .fonts.conf but it did not make a difference (at
> least not visible to me):-/

That *must* make a huge difference. Something must have gone wrong.

You can also see the difference with

    ftdiff -r 96 -s 12 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/albw.ttf

or with

    ftview -r 96 12 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/albw.ttf

and then use the 'f' key to toggle between the byte code interpreter and
the autohinter.

(ftdiff is only available in freetype >= 2.3.4, i.e. only in STABLE, not in
10.2 or SLES10. ftview is available in SLES10 as well).

Ok, so i tried the ftdiff and it looks pretty good.

When mentioning Desktop below, I am talking about the icon text that's on the Desktop.

I can see what my problem is now as well... It's the "shadow" on the font used on the Desktop. A tried to set the background to all black and to all white and it's it's really bad.

So, played a bit more and this is what happens;

1. Change smoothing to NONE, will make the font look really good on the Desktop, but terrible in the App browser.
2. Change smoothing back to greyscale or to subpixel makes it look good in the App browser, but bad on the Desktop.

Is there a way to make the font "thicker" on the Desktop (and only for the Desktop)

BTW; In reply to comment#7;

The terminal font for both SLED and 10.3 is Monospace 10/Regular.

"monospace" is just a generic alias which expands to the "best"
monospace font for your locale. You can check which font this is
by executing

    fc-match monospace

on the command line.

You are scaring me... How is it possible to know this much about fonts? :-)

On my 10.3, monospace expands to DejaVuSansMono.ttf
On my SLED, it expands to cumbwr__.ttf

But anyway... Is it possible to have the font on the Desktop a little bit thicker? Or get rid of the "shade" (drop shadow or what ever it's called)

Magnus Bowman> Is there a way to make the font "thicker" on the
Magnus Bowman> Desktop (and only for the Desktop)

In KDE:

    kcontrol -> Appearance & Themes -> Fonts -> Desktop

There you can choose a special font for the Desktop icons.

I guess something like this must be possible in Gnome as well, but I
Magnus Bowman> haven't found it yet.

I think I have found it:

execute "gnome-font-properties", then change the "desktop" font.

Seems to influence only the desktop icons.

Choosing "Albany AMT" "Bold" there makes it considerably thicker than the default.

Choosing "Sans" "Bold" is the same because "fc-match sans" matches "Albany AMT" on your
system.

Ok, I think this is definitely not a blocker - Mike we should revisit the whole fonts.conf thing soon and see if we can solve it for 10.3.  I can put someone on this within a few weeks.

Mike,
yeah it is not a problem changing the font. What I hope to achieve with this bug-report is to change the default as we ship it.

JP:
Sounds good to me.

Magnus> Mike,
Magnus> yeah it is not a problem changing the font. What I hope to
Magnus> achieve with this bug-report is to change the default as we
Magnus> ship it.

That is a matter of taste though. I like the non-bold desktop icons
much better.  If we would make bold the default for the desktop icons,
I'm sure we will get new bugreports because of that.

In my opinion, the non-bold fonts are usually much better readable in
"normal" sizes.

Mike,
I honestly can't believe that we are seeing the same thing when it comes to what we currently are shipping.
When it comes to using Bold for the Desktop font, I agree that it is not what we want. 
I *do* want something in between though. Is that possible to achieve somehow or would I have to change font?

mboman> I honestly can't believe that we are seeing the same thing
mboman> when it comes to what we currently are shipping.

Well, I looked at your screenshot and in my opinion the fonts under
the desktop icons are perfect in your screenshot.  And I think we both
are looking at the screen shot using an LCD monitor.  The fonts are
designed to look like that.

mboman> When it comes to using Bold for the Desktop font, I agree that
mboman> it is not what we want.

mboman> I *do* want something in between though. Is that possible to
mboman> achieve somehow or would I have to change font?

The autohinter=true setting I wrote in comment #6 might suite your
preferences better. But I certainly don't want to make that the
default either, most people like the byte code rendering much better
(me included).

Rendering with autohinting was the default until SuSE Linux 10.1.

One reason I changed it was that the developers of the DejaVu fonts
had told me that it is stupid not to use the byte code interpreter
when they have invested hours of work per glyphs to make the fonts
render very sharp, keeping the legs of an 'm' symmetrical, etc. ...
Not using the byte code interpreter throws all this work away.

I think they are right.

I'm attaching a quick drawing.

On these pages, the circle to the left is illustrating my eye, the A and B on the left side are icons with text beneath them.

Now, on the first page, where I look straight at the icon/text A, I have no problems at all with the current font/hinting/thickness etc.

But, on the second page, where I look at the icon/text B, I am almost unable to read the text. This is because the text (in white) is to thing, and the shadow (or whatever it's called) in black, melts in with the background. If the font would have been thicker (ie, if I make it bold) I can read this perfectly without having to concentrate. That's because it's not to thing.

Created attachment 135664 [details]
Drawing :-)

Even when viewd from extreme angles worse than in Slide 2 in bug-251157_oooDraw.odg,
it still looks reasonably OK for me. With reasonably OK I mean that it is as least
as good readable for me as the texts in the Application Browser, if not better.

Everything degrades when viewing an LCD display from extreme angles, the colours
change, it gets darker, ...

You mind attaching a screenshot?

I'm looking at *your* screen shot and I think that's OK.

It doesn't matter how *my* desktop looks like when *your* screen shot
displayed on my monitor looks OK.

It doesn't make any sense to make a screen shot of your screen shot
displayed on my monitor.

No, I was after a normal screenshot from your screen. Not a screenshot from you looking at my screenshot.

I'm normally using KDE. But I'll start a Gnome session later and make
a screenshot.

Created attachment 135934 [details]
my-gnome-desktop.png

screen shot of my Gnome desktop.

If you compare the string "mfabian" below the desktop icon at the top
left of my screen shot with the string "mboman" in your screen shot
with "xmag", you will see that these are rendered exactly the same,
pixel for pixel. As expected.

I installed KDE to have a look what you do in there... You use Sans, size 11 on the Desktop. It's work very well. I changed it to size 10 and voila, it looks crap, same as in GNOME.


So I have a suggestion;

Either change the default size to 10 in KDE in change the default size to 12 in GNOME (Using size 11 in GNOME does not have make a big change in the font size as it does in KDE)

Given #30 and the fact I can't see any significant difference in the screenshots (other that the terminal which i don't see in a6) and with the font size fix we just checked in for 2.19.x I'm going to close this one.