[Bug 1722508] Re: Font hinting appears broken on 17.10 beta

[Jeremy Bicha]

> Its not so much that the font rendering is better or worse but that it
is different than before

Gordon, thanks for your reply.

I think your issue is different than the Qt issue mentioned by many of
the commenters here.

I help maintain Ubuntu's font packages, but I just started with that and
I wasn't involved in the freetype 2.7/2.8 upgrade nor am I familiar with
how Ubuntu's font rendering used to work. I encourage you to start a
Desktop topic at https://community.ubuntu.com/ for your suggestion. If
you could provide before and after screenshots, that would be helpful.

We might want to keep a more upstream default font rendering. I don't
know, but I am hopeful that your post will help us figure out what to
do.

By the way, I expect we'll be upgrading to freetype 2.8.1 for Ubuntu
18.04 LTS, but I am waiting for the next Electron release first. See LP:
#1728329

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1722508

Title:
  Font hinting appears broken on 17.10 beta

Status in Qt:
  New
Status in freetype package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in qtbase-opensource-src package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in freetype source package in Artful:
  Confirmed
Status in qtbase-opensource-src source package in Artful:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  It appears that font hinting in 17.10 (beta) doesn't work as expected.
  The issue is easy to miss if you have antialiasing enabled system-
  wise. However, if you install "gnome-tweak-tool" and disable
  antialiasing there, the problem becomes obvious.

  Here is how it looks on 17.10 beta:
  https://postimg.org/image/3auqsbkqtn/

  And here is how it looks on my 16.04 machine (and this is pretty much how it's supposed to look):
  https://postimg.org/image/85n5ss3l4b/

  * When comparing the pictures make sure you "Open image in new tab"
  and see them without browser zoom, otherwise the problem may no be
  obvious.

  I suspect that this issue is caused by a bug in some base font
  rendering package that Ubuntu uses (edit: the problem is probably
  caused by FreeType 2.8.0, see my comments below). A couple of months
  ago a similar issue was reported (and promptly fixed) in Chromium
  after they had changed something in FreeType rendering
  (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=748997).

  lsb_release -rd
  Description: Ubuntu Artful Aardvark (development branch)
  Release:     17.10

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