Hi. I just found out that David Chester has released a new set of patches for improving font rendering in freetype-2.1.3 which he dubs the "smooth" patch. The examples over at his site look great. The README makes some mention of using it with OpenOffice as well which is interesting because I find the font rendering in openoffice-bin most unsatisfactory (fonts are excessively weighted and don't scale correctly for one thing). Please could you consider: 1) Updating the ebuild for freetype and including the patch 2) Integrating into XFree, if required. Perhaps the above could be controlled by use of a new USE flag.
Looks good. Our new Xfree ebuild use system freetype, so I think we should rather patch freetype itself.
Ok, added to freetype-2.1.3.
Wow, that was quick. Thanks a lot, I'm going to try that right away. I'm very pleased to hear that XFree builds against the system freetype now. Did you see how good the OpenOffice shots looked on the site also? Would there be any possibility to clean up the openoffice-bin binary? The modifications that were added to the 1.0.1 build, the truetype tweaks and so forth, just made things a lot worse (and no offense to the person who came up with the patches). I'm trying to write a document now, and I have to go back to Windows and Word because it's quite bad, even 1.0.0 was more workable :-( But on David's site it looks like the best possible font rendering in a word processor on Linux ever ... Basically, can openoffice/openoffice-bin be made to work so that the results are as on David Chester's site? Is he just running an un-modified OpenOffice and his freetype does the good stuff I wonder. Although I haven't tried it yet, I'm worried that the patches in Gentoo's openoffice will interfere. Specifically, from openoffice-1.0.1-r1.ebuild: # Get OO to build with freetype-2.1.2 cd ${S} cp ${DISTDIR}/freetype-${FT_VER}.tar.gz ${S}/freetype/download || die cp ${FILESDIR}/${PV}/freetype-${FT_VER}.patch ${S}/freetype || die epatch ${FILESDIR}/${PV}/${P}-use-freetype-${FT_VER}.patch # Get OO to build with freetype-2.1.2 cd ${S} cp ${DISTDIR}/freetype-${FT_VER}.tar.gz ${S}/freetype/download || die cp ${FILESDIR}/${PV}/freetype-${FT_VER}.patch ${S}/freetype || die epatch ${FILESDIR}/${PV}/${P}-use-freetype-${FT_VER}.patch Won't this need to be changed? Sorry if I should have raised this on a new report but I hope this is consistent with my mention of openoffice in the initial filing of #12016. Many thanks.
