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Font smoothing in general is pretty bad but in Linux it's abysmal. I use bitmap fonts as much as possible and I turn AA off for all fonts below a certain size

Font smoothing in general is pretty bad but in Linux it's abysmal. I use bitmap fonts as much as possible and I turn AA off for all fonts below a certain size (18 px IIRC). I also force Firefox to exclusively use Arial because of the excellent hinting. Things are so much more legible and crisp it's not even funny. (Edit: Funny thing is, I remember font smoothing as much better in general maybe 10-15 years ago. Perhaps it was just the novelty that appealed to me then.)

KozmoNau7 6y ago
I've found the font rendering to be very good indeed ever since the Truetype2 patent expired, so the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled. I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all. It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.
- gombosg 6y ago
  > the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    The patents expired in 2010, and it should be enabled by default starting from Freetype 2.4. Microsofts patents on ClearType color filtering expired in 2019, but I don't know if that has led to any further improvements in Freetype. https://freetype.org/patents.html https://freetype.org/patents.html Make sure you don't have this in your fontconfig: <match target="font"> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> As the autohinter is garbage.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  I'm running 1080p on a 23" screen (96 ppi) and I find Windows font rendering to be much better compared to Linux/Freetype on the same screen. Freetype suffers from intense blurring, colour bleed in subpixel smoothing and variable thicknesses both within glyphs and between two supposedly identical glyphs rendered next to each other.

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I've found the font rendering to be very good indeed ever since the Truetype2 patent expired, so the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled. I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all. It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.

gombosg 6y ago
> the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  The patents expired in 2010, and it should be enabled by default starting from Freetype 2.4. Microsofts patents on ClearType color filtering expired in 2019, but I don't know if that has led to any further improvements in Freetype. https://freetype.org/patents.html https://freetype.org/patents.html Make sure you don't have this in your fontconfig: <match target="font"> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> As the autohinter is garbage.
arexxbifs 6y ago
I'm running 1080p on a 23" screen (96 ppi) and I find Windows font rendering to be much better compared to Linux/Freetype on the same screen. Freetype suffers from intense blurring, colour bleed in subpixel smoothing and variable thicknesses both within glyphs and between two supposedly identical glyphs rendered next to each other.