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Re: [LUG] font rendering done right

 

On 06/06/13 20:31, bad apple wrote:
> 
> Better yet, it also works on Debian (which as much as I love
> it, has *the* worst default font rendering of any OS ever).

The font rendering improved markedly with Squeeze, but still the kerning
is borked. I may have tweaked the default rendering a little in the
past, but in Wheezy the only issue of note is the kerning on Debian to
my eyes. It certainly isn't the worst OS ever, I remember when it was
all monospaced because - well that's how wide a character was.

No current distros are as bad as the PDFs (and thus printing) rendered
by Google Chrome; Google have brought this bad quality kerning to all
the platforms that Chrome runs on - equally opportunity kerning gaff.

Wonder how much coding it took to make the font rendering worse than the
Debian default? Sometimes you have to wonder at progress in computing. I
vaguely recall that on screen font rendering is sometimes worse in
Chrome than Firefox, but I can't remember the specifics.

I've tried using the source to fix the PDF issue but working through the
relevant innards of the libraries broke my will to create a fix after
substantial effort. So I've documented as much breakage as I can and
linked together some of the relevant bug reports, and it does look like
someone will try and fix that one by replacing the rendering engine....

Mostly I conclude that bad font rendering doesn't seem to hold products
back, even web browsers, but then for Chrome it mostly affected printing
and who prints web pages? I believe Safari didn't have the same PDF
issue on MacOS as Chrome had, curious that.



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