Re: How/where is font hinting performed in libreoffice?

[Caolán McNamara <caolan.mcnamara@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2023-11-14 at 16:40 +0100, Frank Steiner wrote:
> Anyway, for me all fonts are totally fine with medium hinting, so I'd
> be way happier with it because I could use microsoft fonts in the
> thinner version.
> 
> People who explicitely set a font hinting style usually know what
> they are doing and why the want it. But to prevent font issues by
> chance because of font settings someone is not aware of, one could
> add a SAL_ALLOW_SYSTEM_FONTHINTING variable that must be set to true
> to keep the hintstyle that is found in
> "cairo_font_options_get_hint_style(pFontOptions)"
> instead of downgrading it to slight.
> 
> I wouldn't mind trying to write a patch for such a variable if there
> is a chance it could be accepted...?

I won't put any road blocks in the way if you want to contribute
something like that. I don't think it will give universally good
results but if you find it works for you and want to use an env
variable, then this is on a very hot code path so use a static like the
static bool noFontLookup = getenv("SAL_NO_FONT_LOOKUP") != nullptr;
example so there isn't a getenv on ever text render.

Maybe SAL_ALLOW_DEFAULT_HINTING is a naming option, along the lines of
the naming used in QFont::HintingPreference of
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qfont.html which has a decent summary on the 
same topic in its option descriptions