When I switched from XFree86 to xorg (using xfs), the appearance of my fonts changed to the worse. It seems that the average font strength has decreased (from about 2 pixels to about 1 pixel on my system), which makes formerly nice fonts pretty unusable. Effectively, they got 1 pixel strength up to size 9 and get much bolder from size 10 on. Before, the transposition went more smoothly. I always have used Luxi Sans as my standard font, as it was beautiful and readable in all sizes. That's especially important on a 1400x1050 Notebook TFT because it needs proper antialiasing and a higher font resolution. As I've got a bootable backup of my Gentoo on external hd, I'm able to demonstrate the differences between the old nice Luxi Sans and the bad new one by screenshooting. The smaller font sizes (near 9) are more affected than the bigger ones. The changes in font rendering don't restrict to Luxi, there are a lot more fonts with the same symptoms. When I switched, I didn't make changes to my config files that could have caused the problem. The fontconfig version has stayed the same. I tried most of the proposals in the forums, including: - remerge of fontconfig, freetype, corefonts and all the stuff you might even need, except xorg-x11 - hide the TTF folder from xfs (the Type1 folder too, for convenience) - disable/change hinting/antialiasing options in /etc/fonts/local.conf - dozens of fc-cache -fv - rebuild the scale-, dir- and cache-files of the TTF and Type1 directories - change xorg.conf's FontPath from the specific paths to xfs ("unix/:-1") - /etc/init.d/xfs restart after every attempt, restart whole X server when having changed settings that are out of xfs' scope Nothing has improved the appearance of my fonts, or changed it greatly (except of course turning antialiasing off). I fear that xorg have done changes to the rendering algorithm that made especially Luxi so ugly. For now, I have changed to Bitstream Vera Sans, which is too broad and got a terrible bold face, but nicer antialiasing. It would be nice to know at least where the change comes from. Of course I'd love to have a revert to the old form. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge -C xfree 2. emerge xorg-x11 3. etc-update 4. replace xfree by xorg-x11 in /etc/make.profile/virtuals 5. change font paths to /usr/share/fonts in the config files ...or something like that.
Created attachment 36481 [details] Screenshot on XFree86 with nice Luxi Sans
Created attachment 36482 [details] Screenshot on xorg with terrible Luxi Sans Hence the changes especially in the K Menu, the italic text of the email and the purple ebuild list of the Gentoo Packages webpage. The changes in the Firefox menu are due to the update from 0.8 to 0.9.1 and don't belong to my problem.
This is probably an issue of the type of Luxi fonts provided -- Type1 or Truetype. foser, can you speak more to or against that?
I don't think it's the Type1/TTF issue. On the one hand, I've tried removing either TTF or Type1 folders and it still looked the same. On the other hand this applies to other fonts too, for example the Microsoft Verdana and Trebuchet MS which don't appear in different versions.
did you update freetype in the process ? how did you install your system exactly, what stage ?
I didn't update freetype when switching to xorg. The last freetype switch goes back to February 04 (to version 2.1.5-r1). I had a stage 2 install in July 2003, but that's long ago. Meanwhile I guess all packages should have been rebuilt. I hope that's what you wanted to read, because I'm not quite sure what you mean with "how did I install the system exactly". If you mean the xorg switch, here's my relevant genlop output: Thu Jul 29 02:12:49 2004 --> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0-r1 Thu Jul 29 02:13:23 2004 --> x11-terms/xterm-191 Thu Jul 29 02:25:50 2004 --> dev-db/mysql-4.0.20 Thu Jul 29 02:32:07 2004 --> dev-db/postgresql-7.4.3 Thu Jul 29 11:55:09 2004 --> kde-base/arts-1.2.3 Thu Jul 29 11:55:34 2004 --> media-libs/sdl-gfx-2.0.11 Thu Jul 29 11:56:06 2004 --> dev-perl/sdl-perl-1.20.3 Thu Jul 29 12:13:26 2004 --> app-office/scribus-1.1.7 Thu Jul 29 12:14:38 2004 --> app-arch/tar-1.14 Thu Jul 29 12:42:03 2004 --> media-libs/freetype-2.1.5-r1 Thu Jul 29 12:42:22 2004 --> app-arch/cabextract-0.6 Thu Jul 29 12:42:36 2004 --> media-fonts/corefonts-1-r1 Thu Jul 29 12:52:31 2004 --> media-fonts/freefonts-0.10-r2 Thu Jul 29 13:30:01 2004 --> media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.2 Thu Jul 29 13:43:31 2004 --> kde-base/kdelibs-3.2.3 Thu Jul 29 14:30:06 2004 --> media-sound/streamripper-1.60.5 Thu Jul 29 14:30:30 2004 --> x11-misc/synaptics-0.13.3 Thu Jul 29 14:31:18 2004 --> mail-mta/ssmtp-2.60.9 Thu Jul 29 15:00:10 2004 --> media-fonts/freefonts-0.10-r2 Thu Jul 29 15:13:32 2004 --> media-libs/freetype-2.1.5-r1 Thu Jul 29 16:40:36 2004 --> media-fonts/sharefonts-0.10-r1 Directly after emerging xorg-x11, I only followed the forum's xorg-fonts mini howto, and that was just renaming font paths and virtuals, as far as I remember.
Well I think it's Luxi indeed, but Jakob here was probably using a +bindist compiled freetype with the autohinter. So that might help, recompiling freetype with USE=bindist . Or just installing & using some better fonts (vera-bitstream-ttf).
so Jakob, what's the status update on this?
Well, I wanted to post the status update for a week, sorry that I'm late. Anyway, one week ago I switched from KDE 3.2.3 to 3.3, and since then the nice fonts are back again. I can't tell what triggered this, but they are as beautiful as before they were broken. They have also recovered in non-KDE applications like Mozilla and the Gimp. I didn't remerge any of the font packages like xorg or freetype or change any of the font settings. I could say that for now my problem is solved, so should I close the bug, or is that weird solution not quite satisfying?
I'll close the bug, feel free to reopen if this ever crops up again.
