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Revision as of 04:39, 19 July 2012 by Tagoh (talk | contribs)

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Fontconfig Enable Autohinting

Summary

The auto-hinting feature in FreeType is enabled by default in f18.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 18
  • Last updated: 2012-07-09
  • Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

The auto-hinting feature in FreeType has been developed to make better rendering without fonts-provided/format-specific hints. It's stable enough because it has been maintained/improved over 10 years since launched and as we got a request in Bug#708525, it may be a good time to enable it by default.

Benefit to Fedora

Enabling the autohint feature may gives us the better rendering.

Scope

The change will be made in fontconfig as the global configuration. basically no need updating other packages unless it introduces the bad rendering for any fonts or the own hinting data may gives us better than this feature. in that case, those fonts may wants to be turn off this feature in their own fontconfig file.

How To Test

That may be good to compare the rendering on desktops, applications between f18 and older releases.

TBD: fonts-tweak-tool may supports changing auto-hinting. it might helps to test.

User Experience

The user will see better rendering as of this feature is enabled.

Dependencies

No dependencies. one line change in the spec file is required to be done.

Contingency Plan

Revert the change if too many fonts packages badly affects and may be good to consider enabling the auto-hinting in the fonts packages for their better rendering.

Documentation

http://freetype.sourceforge.net/autohinting/index.html

Release Notes

Fontconfig in f18 now enables the auto-hinting feature in FreeType by default. Although it's supposed to work better for most of fonts, there may be the case not working better, including the case that the own hinting data gives much better. in this case, you can disable it by putting the following rules to $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf or into $HOME/.config/fontconfig/conf.d as a separate file:

 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
 <fontconfig>
   <match target="font">
     <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
   </match>
 </fontconfig>

Comments and Discussion