Of late I had been having problems with gv, which was rendering fonts very poorly. Since gv uses ghostscript as backend, I finally traced the bug to ghostscript. It seems ghostscript 8.x renders font very poorly. This is particular with documents generated with times font using latex. I searched this site for this bug but could not find. Google helped with this link http://volker.dnsalias.net/soft/rpm/suse10.0/other/ghostscript-library-7.07.1rc1-pref.spec So i downgraded from 8.15.1_p20060430 to 7.07.1-r8. Now the fonts are rendered much better. I have comparitive screenshots and the test postscript, but dont know how to upload them. emerge --info Portage 2.0.54-r2 (default-linux/x86/2006.0, gcc-3.4.5, glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1, 2.6.16-gentoo-r7 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.16-gentoo-r7 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14 ccache version 2.3 [enabled] dev-lang/python: 2.3.5, 2.4.2 dev-python/pycrypto: [Not Present] dev-util/ccache: 2.3 dev-util/confcache: [Not Present] sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/bind" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks fixpackages sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/linux/gentoo http://gentoo.mirrors.easynews.com/linux/gentoo/ http://open-systems.ufl.edu/mirrors/gentoo http://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/gentoo/ http://linux.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/download/gentoo-mirror/ http://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com http://gentoo.ccccom.com/" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.us.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X aalib acl alsa apache2 apm arts audiofile avi bash-completion berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo bzip2 cdr cli crypt cscope cups curl directfb dri dts eds emboss encode esd ethereal exif expat fam ffmpeg flac foomaticdb fortran gd gdbm gif glut gmp gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile idn imagemagick imlib ipv6 isdnlog java jpeg junit kde lcms ldap libg++ libwww mad matroska mikmod mng motif mozilla mp3 mpeg mysql nas ncurses nls nptl odbc ogg opengl oss pam pcre pdflib perl plotutils png postgres pppd python qt quicktime readline reflection sdl session slang spell spl ssl svga tcltk tcpd tetex tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev usb vorbis wmf xine xml xml2 xmms xorg xv xvid zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: CTARGET, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
Created attachment 88236 [details] postscript for testing
Created attachment 88237 [details] test.ps as rendered by 8.x ghostscript. Note poor font rendering
Created attachment 88238 [details] test.ps as rendered by 7.x ghostscript. Contrast this with previous one
Created attachment 88239 [details] test.ps as rendered by 8.x ghostscript at one level zoom
Created attachment 88240 [details] test.ps as rendered by 7.x ghostscript at one level zoom. Notice the difference
Comment on attachment 88236 [details] postscript for testing Ok i finally found how to create attachments. So have uploaded the different renderings. It seems this bug is lying around for an year. Are there any work arounds for this in 8.x?
The behaviour of ghostscript 8.x should be more similar to that of 7.x with the (gs) option -dAlignToPixels=0, which is said to "improve rendering of poorly hinted fonts" in Use.htm.
ah cool, can I enable that per default somewhere in gv?
Under State -> Ghostscript Options, probably in the Antialias Device section.
I added a sed call to gv-3.6.1-r4.ebuild to make that option a default option. Can you please check if it works for you? rsync mirrors should be up-to-date in an hour. Thanks for reporting and for the solution!
