[HN Gopher] Playing with fonts ___________________________________________________________________ Playing with fonts Author : Moist-Toes Score : 29 points Date : 2020-09-14 09:09 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (venam.nixers.net) (TXT) w3m dump (venam.nixers.net) | bscphil wrote: | This is a _great_ post. I love messing with fonts on Linux, but I | ended up with settings that work great for me years ago, so I don | 't do it much any more. (The game changer was when many of the | infinality patches were rolled into fontconfig, so you don't need | to build it yourself any more to get great rendering.) | | The most important takeaways if you're on Linux: | | 1. Make sure you have autohint=false (except for individually | chosen fonts that might need it). You don't want the renderer | ignoring the individual font's hinting information and trying to | do it itself: results are usually quite bad. | | 2. Make sure you have the correct subpixel rendering for your | screen (usually rgb) and enable the lcdfilter. I prefer | "lcdlight". Comparison of different lcdfilter settings here: | http://www.spasche.net/files/lcdfiltering/ | | 3. Consider disabling hinting entirely. I hate it. On a high DPI | screen, you don't need hinting at all, because the edges of a | glyph will already align very closely with the pixels. On a low | DPI screen, especially as you get down closer to 96 dpi, the | amount of distortion needed to align the font with the grid | completely mangles it. You might think there's a sweet spot where | hinting makes sense, but I've never seen one. | | The article actually has a picture illustrating this beautifully: | look how much better the unhinted rendering is than the hinted | one! | https://venam.nixers.net/blog/assets/fun_with_fonts/ftdiff_v... | | If you do disable hinting, you should also change your desktop | environment's default fonts to a family that has very good | _unhinted_ pixel alignment even at small sizes. I use Adobe 's | "Source" family, and it looks fantastic, even at my desktop's | 10pt default size. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-09-14 23:00 UTC)