On Thursday 26 April 2007 02:45, Mark Shroyer wrote:
> These settings make 90% of my fonts look amazing. However, in
> certain fonts -- especially Georgia and Bitstream Vera Serif --
> glyphs' diagonal lines now appear "blotchy". Here's an example
> of Georgia at 14pt in Firefox:
>
> http://markshroyer.com/files/georgia-hinted.png
>
> On the other hand, if I set "Xft.hinting: false" (reverting
> FreeType to its patent-unencumbered auto-hinting mode, if I am
> not mistaken), everything returns to normal: except that my
> Webcore fonts are no longer as crisp as genuine pixel-aligned
> TrueType hinting would allow for, of course.
You're fighting a known problem. Hinting on small fonts tends to make a
mess. Of course, "small" is defined by your resolution and hardware so
the problem changes from system to system.
As Radu mentioned, you can us fonts.conf to control hinting in various
ways based on font family name and pixel size or either. If hinting
tends to break down for you with fonts smaller than a particular size,
you can globally disable hinting on all fonts at that size or smaller.
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<test name="pixelsize" compare="less">
<double>7.5</double>
</test>
<edit name="hinting">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
To translate from "points" to pixels, you'll need to know your hardware
and settings. This link might help.
http://www.wpdfd.com/wpdtypo3a.htm
Personally, I hate all the stupid decoration fonts, so my systems are
configured to *only* use a single font that is designed for
readability, namely, Terminus.
jcr
