Default font settings in Ubuntu

[Alex Jones]

On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 19:18 +0100, Florian Zeitz wrote:
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> Alex Jones schrieb:
> > Hi List
> > 
> > I propose two changes to the default font settings in Ubuntu.
> > 
> >      1. Disable hinting so that fonts maintain their original shape
> >      2. Enable colourised anti-aliasing, with David Turner's patches
> >         applied (pre-made packages available at
> >         <http://diego.aureal.com.pe/fonts/> courtesy of Diego Escalante)
> > 
> > After an infinite amount of fiddling with my monitor's settings, the
> > best result was just to set them to default and use the filtered
> > unhinted fonts.
> > 
> > Many people complain that using unhinted fonts makes them look blurry
> > and fat. I suggest to them that given 10 minutes getting used to
> > unhinted, hinted fonts look eroded, out of shape, and unreasonably
> > harsh. Any affinity towards the shape of the hinted (distorted) fonts
> > could be resolved by finding a font with the actual shapes they want. In
> > many people's opinion, Bitstream Vera Sans is a beautiful font with
> > beautiful shapes, shapes which are entirely inconsistent with hinting
> > enabled at small sizes.
> > 
> > Please take a look at two screenshots of an email I have linked for
> > your analysis.
> > 
> >       * RGB Unhinted:
> >         <http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/5867/filteredunhintedsm0.png> 
> >       * Greyscale Hinted:
> >         <http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8472/greyscalehintedfq8.png> 
> > 
> > Thanks for reading!
> 
> As long as it is configurable I don't really care what is default, but
> personally I have the impression that the hinted version looks a lot better.
> Actually I debootstraped a feisty today and the first thing I noticed
> was that the fonts looked really ugly. After a while I realized, that it
> was because I had hinting turned off.
> I also tried the David Turner patched debs a while back and they had
> some very strange effects for me (red pixels on font boarder).
> 
> I still have the impression that none of the options for font rendering
> currently available comes even near to Windows defaults (That may be a
> matter of taste though).

It's really not that complicated! Windows uses bytecode-hinted RGB fonts
for its "ClearType" mode. That's it!

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