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Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install. Linux se

Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install. Linux seems to have a lot of detractors around these parts. This person obviously cares more about fonts than freedom, privacy, and respect for the end user.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> everything displayed perfectly But what do you consider 'perfect' font rendering? Maybe it's a lower bar than the author.
- BenjiWiebe 8y ago
  I use Fedora and I've never noticed anything wrong with the font rendering. However, now that I've read the article, I'm guessing that's why I notice more eye strain when doing lots of reading on my computer versus the other (Windows) computer in the house.
snazz 8y ago
Fedora includes fonts to cover most every common Unicode glyph. If you visit my HN profile page, I see few boxes on Fedora, compared to Android or Debian. Additionally, their font hinting looks good out of the box and it can be configured in GNOME Tweak Tool. I’m impressed at the Fedora team’s attention to visual detail.
onli 8y ago
I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ and look at "Willing". Compare with https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.pn.... On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in that word. That's a shame. There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all engines have that issue that's a real problem.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  If I look at 'willing' closely on that page, there is what I perceive to be about a 20% increase of spacing between the the second 'l' and the second 'i' character. I didn't notice it at first, I had to look at it very closely.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    The kerning is absolutely perfect on my system, both Firefox and Chrome, both portrait and landscape. It looks nothing like the disaster on the article's snapshot. (Debian Stable, 3x 1920x1200 monitors, very likely I have tweaked most tweakable things at some point or another -- this system is 15 years old.)
    - onli 8y ago
      Could you make a screenshot? But if the system is very old it is possible the bug is not present yet, the author mentioned it is caused by modern changes colliding with the hardcoded assumptions about the grid placement. If those are still current on your system it might just still work like it was supposed to.
      - dsr_ 8y ago
        When I say "the system is 15 years old" what I mean is that there is a continuity between the Pentium-III-550 with 128MB RAM -- running Debian 3 on a spinning IDE disk -- and the i5-4570 on my desk now with Debian 9.8 on 16GB and ZFS on two SSDs. The software has been continuously upgraded, the hardware has been occasionally upgraded; everything is up to date, but if I did something exciting to /etc/fonts.conf in 2014, that's probably still there.
  - onli 8y ago
    That's horrible, isn't it? The author does have a valid bug there that really is a big issue if you care about this sort of thing (some people just don't care how fonts look and can't notice kerning issues), but the whole comment thread is discussing very subjective rendering differences between Windows, Linux and OSX, where Linux isn't even bad. Though I think the author did himself no favor with not leading with that bug.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> everything displayed perfectly But what do you consider 'perfect' font rendering? Maybe it's a lower bar than the author.

BenjiWiebe 8y ago
I use Fedora and I've never noticed anything wrong with the font rendering. However, now that I've read the article, I'm guessing that's why I notice more eye strain when doing lots of reading on my computer versus the other (Windows) computer in the house.

snazz 8y ago

Fedora includes fonts to cover most every common Unicode glyph. If you visit my HN profile page, I see few boxes on Fedora, compared to Android or Debian. Additionally, their font hinting looks good out of the box and it can be configured in GNOME Tweak Tool. I’m impressed at the Fedora team’s attention to visual detail.

onli 8y ago

I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ and look at "Willing". Compare with https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.pn.... On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in that word. That's a shame. There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all engines have that issue that's a real problem.

linuxftw 8y ago
If I look at 'willing' closely on that page, there is what I perceive to be about a 20% increase of spacing between the the second 'l' and the second 'i' character. I didn't notice it at first, I had to look at it very closely.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  The kerning is absolutely perfect on my system, both Firefox and Chrome, both portrait and landscape. It looks nothing like the disaster on the article's snapshot. (Debian Stable, 3x 1920x1200 monitors, very likely I have tweaked most tweakable things at some point or another -- this system is 15 years old.)
  - onli 8y ago
    Could you make a screenshot? But if the system is very old it is possible the bug is not present yet, the author mentioned it is caused by modern changes colliding with the hardcoded assumptions about the grid placement. If those are still current on your system it might just still work like it was supposed to.
    - dsr_ 8y ago
      When I say "the system is 15 years old" what I mean is that there is a continuity between the Pentium-III-550 with 128MB RAM -- running Debian 3 on a spinning IDE disk -- and the i5-4570 on my desk now with Debian 9.8 on 16GB and ZFS on two SSDs. The software has been continuously upgraded, the hardware has been occasionally upgraded; everything is up to date, but if I did something exciting to /etc/fonts.conf in 2014, that's probably still there.
- onli 8y ago
  That's horrible, isn't it? The author does have a valid bug there that really is a big issue if you care about this sort of thing (some people just don't care how fonts look and can't notice kerning issues), but the whole comment thread is discussing very subjective rendering differences between Windows, Linux and OSX, where Linux isn't even bad. Though I think the author did himself no favor with not leading with that bug.