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Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

Graphical Environments, Managers, Multimedia & Desktop questions.
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dkolak
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Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#1 Post by dkolak »

I've patched Lenny's deb's according to David Turner's guide http://quanli.googlepages.com/davidturn ... rdebiansid, his packages are bit outdated but patches work.

download packages http://rapidshare.com/files/282294048/debs.tar.gz
tar -xvf debs.tar.gz
cd debs/
dpkg -i *.deb
change settings:
System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts
set Rendering to LCD's > Details
set Resolution: 86 and Hinting: Slight
reboot

RESULT
Attachments
deb_after.jpg
deb_after.jpg (83.84 KiB) Viewed 10045 times
deb_before.jpg
deb_before.jpg (50.33 KiB) Viewed 10045 times

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dbbolton
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#2 Post by dbbolton »

Why does that require a patch? Didn't Gnome's font configuration tool already have that ability?
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#3 Post by julian67 »

Xfce4.6

Image
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dkolak
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#4 Post by dkolak »

You have to patch it, fonts can't look that good if you do simple reconfiguring, Ubuntu guys have patched it, so if you do patch and configure it fonts will look exactly like those in ubuntu, here is nice interview with David Turner author of Freetype where he explains some things http://www.osnews.com/story/18166/Inter ... f_Freetype

I don't know if it works in xfce, I haven't tried it , from what I've read, patches are for libcairo2 (Gnome) and libxft2 (KDE)

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#5 Post by julian67 »

dkolak wrote:I've patched Lenny's deb's according to David Turner's guide http://quanli.googlepages.com/davidturn ... rdebiansid, his packages are bit outdated but patches work.
I'm confused. Those patches are very old. Freetype is already in Debian by default. What is there to patch? What's supposed to be wrong with these non-patched fonts?

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#6 Post by gnudude »

dkolak wrote:I've patched Lenny's deb's according to David Turner's guide...
I think the important part of that guide is at the bottom....

Image

although I prefer greyscale/medium/RGB myself...

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#7 Post by julian67 »

That subpixel stuff looks like crap. Do people really think it adds something good? They actually prefer text with colour fringing?

As far as I can tell it's useful for very crappy, very small screens. I tried it on XP but even on my 12.1" 4:3 old low contrast not-glossy laptop screen cleartype introduces obvious colour artefacts around text so I don't use it. It seems to be one of those things that looks good for the first few seconds (oooh! See the high contrast!) and then you notice how crappy it really is.
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#8 Post by gnudude »

I assume it looks good on some peoples screens....???... maybe...

I just meant the important part was to play with the font settings for smoothing/hinting/subpixel stuff. I would think the dpi would also matter although he marked that out.


ps - not to mention that downloading a bunch of debs from rapidshare and installing them is....well....scary.....

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#9 Post by julian67 »

I had a look at the linked discussion. 29 posts of people jerking off about stuff they can configure in a few seconds :?

The Xfce config box I posted up above is 1:1 from my screen, though converted from png to jpg for the free image hosting, and I'm still at a loss as to how it could be more legible. It definitely looks better than that sorry looking Gnome preferences box :D

DPI is definitely important, especially for graphics work, and having everything in proportion (icons, text, decoration etc). I was amazed that in Vista I couldn't set a custom DPI smaller than Billy G thinks it should be (even though he is wrong and I am right....usual story), only Stupidly Bigger (Cos It Must Mean Better) is allowed in Vista Land. Bleurgh. XP lets you do it almost as easily as free software. And I just had another play with the MS XP Cleartype Tuner PowerToy (OMG it wuz so pwuful!). I love the fact that the text in the cleartype config box is set to look incredibly bad, much worse than any other text anywhere else on the OS, unless cleartype is switched on :lol:
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dkolak
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#10 Post by dkolak »

Whenever there's a choice you'll always find few people who think x is better than y.
I came across David Turners guide, applied patches to current packages and it worked. I know patches from rapid are scary and that's why i posted link to David's guide so you can patch it yourself if you don't trust me an you have time and nerve to do it. There are some issues with patents and that's why those patches aren't in current releases of freetype, cairo ... you can read about that in interview I've posted.

I've only wanted to save some time for people who like fonts like those in ubuntu because I know how much time I've invested to find and apply this solution. Other people who are satisfied with current look don't have to apply patches I'm not forcing you :).

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#11 Post by julian67 »

OK, but I'm still struggling to see the problem these patches supposedly solve. As I mentioned earlier, can anyone point out or describe the legibility issue in the screenshots I posted, which are 1:1 jpgs from my screen? The Xfce config screenshot is of my actual config by the way, with custom DPI so that 1" on screen does measure 1".

I can't help noticing that the legibility in the Gnome preferences panel used in the example is unquestionably bad, having poor sharpness and contrast. Maybe it's a low res screenshot, though you'd imagine someone writing such patches and promoting them would take the trouble to make decent screenshots and actually show the benefits. The final screenshot he posted looks so poor that my natural reaction is to rub my eyes and clean my glasses..... maybe it's a joke? But on a real system (mine) using only the fonts and Xfce config tool from Debian main there is no such problem.

I do like seeing solutions to problems but I'm wary of solutions being posed when the problem doesn't seem apparent. Maybe it's an issue with Gnome of 2006 and not relevant now?
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#12 Post by hcgtv »

I went through this back in 2006 with Sarge, this is from a blog post I made back then:

Since I purchased my LCD monitor, I've been tweaking the X and Font servers. 48 hours later and I've got my display looking just as good as Cleartype on Windows.

Information is a bit scattered and it doesn't help when you hit a How-To that's years old. Hours of Googling eventually yielded the answers I was looking for, perseverance pays off.

In a nutshell, these are the steps I took for my LCD:

a) Set the correct DPI in X, horizontal resolution divided by monitor screen width in inches.
b) Install some truetype fonts, grab them off your Windows partition.
c) Turn on anti-aliasing, sub-pixel hinting (RGB - medium) - both in KDE and Gnome.
d) In Firefox and Thunderbird set the display resolution to system setting.
e) Now comes the most important step, this is the golden nugget I found today. Turning on the Bytecode Interpreter varies by distribution, in Debian Sarge it was a matter of adding some lines to my .fonts.conf file, you might need to recompile freetype or grab a special RPM.

Once the bytecode interpreter was turned on, all my hard work came to life. KDE and Gnome look awesome, Firefox renders sites like the designer meant them to be seen and Thunderbird looks professional. We've come a long way from the CDE days, Desktop Linux is a reality.
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#13 Post by julian67 »

In Debian the bytcode interpreter has been enabled by default since 2006 :wink:

reference http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=340001

And there are two useful web DPI calculators I've used:

http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html

http://www.le-web.org/dpi-calculator/
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#14 Post by hcgtv »

julian67 wrote:In Debian the bytcode interpreter has been enabled by default since 2006 :wink:
They must of heard my frustrations :)
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#15 Post by EvilGuru »

julian67 wrote:OK, but I'm still struggling to see the problem these patches supposedly solve. As I mentioned earlier, can anyone point out or describe the legibility issue in the screenshots I posted, which are 1:1 jpgs from my screen? The Xfce config screenshot is of my actual config by the way, with custom DPI so that 1" on screen does measure 1".
They solve the problem of using subpixel rendering with medium and slight hinting. Without these packages there will be severe colour fringing. The characters, C, D and M in the screenshot you posted would all look much nicer with subpixel rendering.
julian67 wrote:I can't help noticing that the legibility in the Gnome preferences panel used in the example is unquestionably bad, having poor sharpness and contrast. Maybe it's a low res screenshot, though you'd imagine someone writing such patches and promoting them would take the trouble to make decent screenshots and actually show the benefits. The final screenshot he posted looks so poor that my natural reaction is to rub my eyes and clean my glasses..... maybe it's a joke? But on a real system (mine) using only the fonts and Xfce config tool from Debian main there is no such problem.
Agreed. In fact, I am not convinced that it is even subpixel rendered at all. Seems like greyscale AA to me.
julian67 wrote:I do like seeing solutions to problems but I'm wary of solutions being posed when the problem doesn't seem apparent. Maybe it's an issue with Gnome of 2006 and not relevant now?
It is still very much apparent, however only shows itself when using the slight and medium hinting options in FreeType.
julian67 wrote:In Debian the bytcode interpreter has been enabled by default since 2006.
The byte-code interpreter is evil. Now, I am not particularly bothered about software patents, however, I do care about high quality type. The byte-code interpreter encourages the use of highly aggressive font hinting. This is bad for several reasons.

Firstly, it destroys any hope of gaining resolution independence. Aggressive font hinting results in a 'drift' of around 1em for every 10 characters rendered. This means that the actual width of a rendered string will be ±1em from what the font designer intended or the result of printing it. A consequence of this? You can no longer zoom text on your screen as the locations of line breaks becomes dependant on the zoom factor.

This is why PDF documents render differently to other pieces of text. PDF files are by design resolution independent, so the use of any horizontal hinting is out of the question. It also has consequences for WYSIWYG editors, which need to either disable hinting or insert small amounts of space to counteract the drift caused by hinting.

Secondly, only TrueType files have bytecode. The other major font format, Adobe Type 1 (PFB), has virtually no hinting controls. Further, since most OpenType fonts store their outlines in Type 1 format hinting bytecode is not universally available. This means you still need to fall back to the auto-hinter for a lot of fonts.

Finally it is interesting to note that Apple — who own the (questionable) patents on TrueType bytecode — have all but abandoned it in OS X — which as far as I can tell does not make use of font hinting information but instead uses anti-aliasing, subpixel positioning and subpixel rendering.

Since many have asked what the big deal is I've attached a screenshot of my website -- http://freddie.witherden.org -- as rendered by Firefox 3.5 on a Gentoo system with the aforementioned Ubuntu patches. Serif fonts are somewhat more interesting as the results are usually more pronounced than with sans serif fonts. The DPI is 99x98, as reported by xdpyinfo.
subpixel.png
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Regards, Freddie.
Last edited by EvilGuru on 2010-08-29 16:54, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#16 Post by julian67 »

EvilGuru wrote:The characters, C, D and M in the screenshot you posted would all look much nicer with subpixel rendering.
I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm on one side of the looking glass and some other people are on the other.....

'nicer'

What does this mean? Can it be defined? Can it be demonstrated? Can someone show what is deficient in the letters C,D & M as is?

What special qualities do the letters C, D & M have (or lack) that they would benefit while the other letters deserve no mention?

And the trouble with sub-pixel rendering is that it introduces colour artefacts that more than negate any other benefits it might have. That's not an OS issue, it's there on Windows as well. Apparently a lot of people don't notice or care about a colour fringe and poor edge definition but it always looks quite apparent to me, and very strange. Perhaps reading too many printed books with black text on white(ish) background has somehow blinded me to the benefits of ill defined text with a colour fringe.....

So now I've heard that the byte code interpreter is absolutely required and also that it's 'evil' and also that it's the wrong kind.

Can anyone offer an objective, reasoned, response to my earlier question "can anyone point out or describe the legibility issue in the screenshots I posted, which are 1:1 jpgs from my screen? "

Answering "something else would be nicer/better" is not a good answer because it tells me nothing, it demonstrates nothing, it offers no comparison, it offers no method for comparison.

But I visited your site (and remembered to change the browser preferences so it displays fonts how you want, not how I want) and I can see the difference and your screenshot does demonstrate the fonts being rendered better than when I visit your site for real, but it seems to be particular to certain fonts. And I prefer to choose fonts I find easy to read so by default I have browsers set to use my choices not someone else's. Actually your site is very legible by default but many are not, the authors seeming to prefer effect to function....I wish there was such an easy fix for all those sites who use white text over black background, or grey on blue or anything made by an emo or a goth.......
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#17 Post by EvilGuru »

julian67 wrote:What does this mean? Can it be defined? Can it be demonstrated? Can someone show what is deficient in the letters C,D & M as is?

What special qualities do the letters C, D & M have (or lack) that they would benefit while the other letters deserve no mention?
The C and D are noticeable as they have large, shallow curves. The M has two diagonals. All three have the property that it is possible to tell which parts of them are anti-aliased. The ability to break a character down into anti-aliased and non-anti-aliased parts is not ideal.
julian67 wrote:And the trouble with sub-pixel rendering is that it introduces colour artefacts that more than negate any other benefits it might have. That's not an OS issue, it's there on Windows as well. Apparently a lot of people don't notice or care about a colour fringe and poor edge definition but it always looks quite apparent to me, and very strange. Perhaps reading too many printed books with black text on white(ish) background has somehow blinded me to the benefits of ill defined text with a colour fringe.....
It is no so much of an OS issue but an implementation issue. Windows is known for quite bad colour fringes (namely green fringes on letters such as 'l'). Mac OS X is much better and on a par with Linux (with the aforementioned patches).

So now I've heard that the byte code interpreter is absolutely required and also that it's 'evil' and also that it's the wrong kind.
julian67 wrote:Can anyone offer an objective, reasoned, response to my earlier question "can anyone point out or describe the legibility issue in the screenshots I posted, which are 1:1 jpgs from my screen? "
There are no legibility issues. However, if you disabled anti-aliasing completely there would also be no legibility issues. But, if you own an LCD screen it is possible to improve the rendering, by effectively giving you three times the horizontal resolution.

A couple of really good articles on the topic is the one by Steve Gibson (love him or hate him, the article is well written): http://www.grc.com/ct/cleartype.htm and the other by the lead-dev of AGG: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_ ... index.html

For those that are interested in such font rendering I'll post a list later of all of the patches required on my Gentoo system (FreeType, Cairo, Xft and Fontconfig all need to be patched).

Regards, Freddie.

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#18 Post by julian67 »

EvilGuru wrote: It is no so much of an OS issue but an implementation issue. Windows is known for quite bad colour fringes (namely green fringes on letters such as 'l'). Mac OS X is much better and on a par with Linux (with the aforementioned patches).
Thanks for the links, and the screenshot of your site. So far that's the only really good "I can see the difference without trying or wondering if I'm imagining it" comparison I've seen, and your page's patched fonts do definitely look much nicer than the unpatched ones.

On the subject of colour fringing I really don't like it. In Windows it is very noticeable, comically so, and while it's less apparent in free software it still looks bad, like a photo taken with a plastic lens. I don't have a Mac to compare so I'll take your word for it that it's similar. But I think I prefer good old black text without the colours and to disrespect webmasters and designers everywhere by only allowing to display the fonts I find pleasant/readable/clear. I imagine this whole issue only really matters to some of the people who produce content, not the consumer?
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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#19 Post by EvilGuru »

Okay. Here is the list of patches that are applied by the dev-null Gentoo overlay. The provide, without a doubt, the highest quality subpixel rendering I've seen on Linux.

Cairo Xft Fontconfig Freetype
  • Just needs to be compiled with FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING, may already be so.
While the Cairo and Xft patches are slightly different to those applied by the Ubuntu maintainers they serve a similar purpose.

As for why I'm posting after quite a long period of inactivity. Well, a few days back I purchased myself a new laptop with the intent of running GNU/Linux on it. My previous laptops have always been Macs and my desktops have always run Gentoo. However, I would be a lot more comfortable running Debian on my new laptop (less installation issues etc) and dislike the long release cycle of Ubuntu. But, font rendering is paramount to me, so I went off to check what the subpixel rendering on Debian is like. The search feature brought me here.

Guess if I want subpixel rendering I've either got to patch the packages myself for Debian or stick with what I know (Gentoo + unofficial overlay/repository).

Regards, Freddie.

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Re: Better looking font on LCD's in lenny easy way

#20 Post by EvilGuru »

Good news. All of the above patches apply cleanly to the latest dpkg's in Squeeze. Installing the packages with dpkg -i results in beautiful subpixel fonts. (Although dpkg -i seems like a kludge to me :)

However, I did run into a minor issue when patching fontconfig. The patch adds several configuration options in /etc/fonts/conf.d/. But for some reason these are not present in the dpkg. I am unsure why however suspect it is because the Makefile is not being regenerated from Makefile.am

I'd be interested if anyone wants the packages (or help building them themselves) or can help me with my fontconfig issue.

Regards, Freddie.

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