Bug 90495 – cjk patch for freetype

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED CANTFIX

[Description Diego Elio Pettenò (RETIRED) 2005-04-26 07:03:40 UTC]

Currently in freetype-2.1.9-r1 ebuild there's a FIXME comment about the missing cjk patch:

# add autohint patch from http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/freetype2/
# FIXME : patch hasn't been updated yet
# use cjk && epatch ${FILESDIR}/${SPV}/${P}-autohint-cjkfonts-20031130.patch

The patch at that url isn't updated since 2.1.7 version (2003), but there's an updated patch at http://cle.linux.org.tw/Slackware/slackware-10.1/extrax/source/Firefly-patch/ which is for 2.1.9 version, applies cleanly and compile fine.

[Comment 1 foser (RETIRED) 2005-04-26 07:26:22 UTC]

Could the cjk team maybe have another look at what this patch does, why we should apply it exactly and if it's really a notable improvement for cjk users ?

[Comment 2 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) 2005-04-26 08:51:55 UTC]

the cjk autohint patch improvement is demonstrated with these screenshots:

http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/screenshots/freetype-noautohint-nogamma.png
http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/screenshots/freetype-autohint-nogamma.png
http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/screenshots/freetype-autohint-gamma.png

notice that the chinese characters for the "file" menu is much cleaer in the autohint version compared to the one with no autohint.

the patch applies for me but i don't notice any significant improvement. maybe i need to fiddle with my fonts.conf?

[Comment 3 foser (RETIRED) 2005-04-26 11:52:48 UTC]

A quick peek at the code suggest that it uses certain unicode ranges to decide wheter or not to use it's hint method, so no I don't think you need to fiddle with configs. Like which of the screenshots does the default gentoo freetype look ?

[Comment 4 Diego Elio Pettenò (RETIRED) 2006-03-09 04:30:46 UTC]

I think this can be closed as CANTFIX as 2.1.10 removed the autohinter entirely but still has to improve CJK support:

- update to 2.1.10.
  + fixes serious bug introduced in 2.1.8 which caused many
  distortions for TrueType fonts
  + amount of heap memory used is drastically reduced
  For more details see /usr/share/doc/packages/freetype2/CHANGES.
- disable freetype-autohint-cjkfonts.patch for the moment, the
  auto-hinter has been replaced with a new module called the
  'auto-fitter' which is "prepared better to support non-latin1
  scripts in next releases". Currently the rendering quality of
  CJK fonts seems to have suffered though compared to 2.1.9
  with the freetype-autohint-cjkfonts.patch.

comes from http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/xorg-x11/suse/freetype2-2.1.10-4/freetype2.spec .