[HN Gopher] Playing with fonts
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-09-14 23:00 UTC)