A couple quote from
here:
cryzed wrote:Since the future of the infinality-bundle is uncertain this is a good time as any to bite the bullet and remove it completely from your system until more is known. The font rendering won't be exactly the same, but with a few tweaks it will at least be similar.
stevenbenner wrote:I'll miss Infinality, it was easy to set up and looked great. The standard font rendering simply isn't as good. But it was always a hack, so I knew this day would come. Hopefully we can look forward to some new guides and tools to improve font rendering
In my GDrive there are now latest versions of FreeType [2.7.1], Harfbuzz [1.4.1] and Fontconfig (all vanilla of course). You should install both FT and HB, as they got new features (interdependece, this build of HB depends on FT >=2.7.1).
Debian is now in freeze state, I suppose there will not be new versions of FreeType until Stretch will be officially released (maybe 6 months).
jim_p wrote:Any suggestions on what we do next? I did try the freetype 2.7 packages that bubuxp provides from his google drive on a fresh installation, but, as I mailed him, plain freetype is still no match to infinality...
For the record, I am using ms fonts (verdana 10 on the apps and andale mono 12 on the terminal) and numix as my gtk theme, so I have the "white fonts on dark background" experience, which is really really bad on plain freetype.
You could try installing the latest vanilla FT, HB and FC and then install the fontconfig-infinality package.
Or, without fontconfig-infinality, add the following code to your
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, adding other settings and changing them to make Verdana font looks better:
Code: Select all
<!-- Verdana -->
<match target="font">
<test name="family">
<string>Verdana</string>
</test>
<edit name="hintstyle">
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
<edit name="autohint">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
Because some fonts looks better with hintfull, others with hintslight, some of them with autohint enabled, some others with a legacy lcdfilter, etc.
I suggest also to use a recent version of Verdana and other MS fonts (from Win10), as they got better rendering instruction than the mscorefonts installed in Debian/Ubuntu, that are ~15 years old (I made
a package with those new fonts, you can find it in my GDrive).
I could recompile easily, but 2.7+ introduces many changes in the rendering code and, while Infinality is essentially a hack, adapting it to the new code without knowing what you're really doing could lead to unexpected results (bohoomil itself didn't know how Infinality code works, only the original Infinality developer really knew what his code do in details). So, re-read the two comments on top of this post and if you still want to stay with Infinality, keep the FT 2.6.3 version (in the meantime, FreeType default rendering could improve further).
For everyone considering to return to vanilla rendering I can help as much as I can (it depends on my real job duties) searching for your ideal fontconfig configuration (the page linked at the beginning of this post could be helpful, even if referred to ArchLinux).