On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 05:27:16PM -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote: > Its very hard to talk about rendering issues unless we build up a > flipbook of screencaptures that show the differences between different > package builds in a standardized way. I suffer from the same I either was the original poster complaining about font rendering or I replied to the original poster. I was going to answer to your request for a screenshot when I would have had access to my Rawhide system again, at the end of the day, but I was satisfied with Owen's reply, so I didn't produce any screenshots. Plus, I don't use standard fonts, so my report would have been not so easy to reproduce. Anyway, I took the last screenshot I had for the system, dating back to August 28th 2003, and compared it to today's Rawhide. I am not sure what was in Rawhide on that day, but you can see some differences. You can of course point out that pretty much every package on the system has changed between the two screenshots. Heck, even the browser is not exactly the same: Mozilla vs Firefox. Same for the themes used. The image with the screenshots side-by-side can be found at http://yax.uberh4x0r.org/cairoatemyfancyfonts.png (you probably want to look at it on an LCD screen because of subpixel rendering) On the left, the desktop before Cairo. On the right, the desktop after Cairo. Compare for example the text "Applications". The first difference I notice with Cairo is that subpixel smoothing for LCD screens is never applied, no matter what the settings. Second, text seems to look smaller now, probably because Cairo seems to ignore the DPI settings. Even making the default size one point larger to compensate for the difference, the text rendering quality is not as good as it was. Third, some sort of hinting seems be always at work, again ignoring the font preferences. With the font I use, ITC Officina Serif, rendering is much better when no hinting is applied. Look at the "T" in "Telescope" on the right. Or look at the "9" in "87 of 96 comments". It's horrible. At lower point sizes, it gets even worse and it becomes barely distinguishable from a 0. I really noticed this while doing online shopping. What was actually a price of $199.95 looked to me as $100.05 instead. Thankfully, I noticed something funny with the rendered text before I placed any orders under the impression of having found a real bargain. ;) I know that this is Rawhide after all and that the Cairo/GTK folks are aware of the issues involved. So I won't be complaining again until FC5t1 is 304 weeks away. What you say seems to call for some program that can automate the task of rendering parts of the GUI in a reproduceable fashion, in order to spot any regressions. Does anything like that exist? It would be nice to have such a tool. Ideally, it would be fed Glade files or something along those lines. It took me way too long to doctor that image in the GIMP, it should rather be a matter of minutes or even seconds. -- Rudi -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
