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.
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 ?
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?
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 ?
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 .