It would be amazing if we could patch the supported versions with the respective USE flags for vastly superior font rendering, akin (although still inferior) to the one achieved by Acrobat's CoolType library. https://github.com/giddie/poppler-qt4-cairo-backend Reproducible: Always
Interesting idea and nice rendered fonts. Patches however make source deviate quite a bit from upstream, making future revbumps tricky. if anything it could be added behind some masked USE flag. (needs to be masked as we don't guarantee that it actually always builds and maintaining patch compatibility in Gentoo would be a chore).
(In reply to Maciej Mrozowski from comment #1) > Interesting idea and nice rendered fonts. Patches however make source > deviate quite a bit from upstream, making future revbumps tricky. if > anything it could be added behind some masked USE flag. (needs to be masked > as we don't guarantee that it actually always builds and maintaining patch > compatibility in Gentoo would be a chore). That would be very nice and I whole heartedly agree with your approach.
Although it would be nice to always have the latest officially supported version (0.37 in this case) in the tree.
Hi there, I'm the author of the poppler-qt4-cairo patchset. Just wanted to let you know that there have been very few occasions where I needed to make code changes to the patchset since I created it. From version to version, generally only an soname in a CMakeLists file is affected. I respond to out-of-date notifications on the ArchLinux AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/poppler-qt-lcd/), and of course you can always create an issue on the Github repository. The only issue you may encounter is that I only made the necessary modifications to the CMake build system. If you need support for autotools, I imagine it should be an easy fix for someone familiar with the build system. I'd gratefully receive a patch or pull request for this :p
Oh, in fact the soname bump doesn't even affect the standard patchset. I'm thinking of an additional patch I use in the ArchLinux AUR PKGBUILD to enable building of the qt4 backend without building the whole poppler library.
Any news on this?
Ok, let's try this. cairo-qt USE flag added, masked by default. I needed to rebase qt4-lcd branch manually on top of upstream 0.42 release to make patchset apply cleanly. I didn't notice any particular kerning improvements in sample .pdf file I checked, output is just a bit less blurry though (sometimes to the point of being slightly jagged using system-default font antialiasing settings - disabled? with antialiasing explicitly enabled in System Settings, differences between Splash and Cairo are even smaller). As long as patches apply, I can keep them in tree I guess...
It looks better, but with excessive fringing, as a result of the Cairo backend using FT_LCD_FILTER_LEGACY as opposed to FT_LCD_FILTER_DEFAULT.
(In reply to Maciej Mrozowski from comment #7) > Ok, let's try this. cairo-qt USE flag added, masked by default. > I needed to rebase qt4-lcd branch manually on top of upstream 0.42 release > to make patchset apply cleanly. > I didn't notice any particular kerning improvements in sample .pdf file I > checked, output is just a bit less blurry though (sometimes to the point of > being slightly jagged using system-default font antialiasing settings - > disabled? with antialiasing explicitly enabled in System Settings, > differences between Splash and Cairo are even smaller). > As long as patches apply, I can keep them in tree I guess... If you want better font rendering you'll need to patch your Cairo as well. I know you're not the Cairo maintainer, I'm just letting you know on the basis of achieving the best possible font rendering. Patch: https://github.com/CrisBRM/fontconfig-ultimate/commit/b6c84fcd9822cb42b0b1593970288dd8e222e06a
@Alexander What do you think? Fancy adding that patch behind some masked USE flag?
