4 ms·

I've been anticipating a new cairo release for some time. The same Mathias Clasen who wrote this email has done amazing work at getting Pango font rendering a l

by DCKing 6y ago

I've been anticipating a new cairo release for some time. The same Mathias Clasen who wrote this email has done amazing work at getting Pango font rendering a lot closer to what is possible on Windows and macOS. The killer feature for me is subpixel positioning of glyphs [2]. He made these changes over a year ago. The result would be all GTK apps being able to perform much finer grained glyph positioning, potentially fixing a lot weird font positioning issues that bother me in GTK apps. But for any distro to make use them this needs a cairo release with his patches built in. I found myself periodically visiting cairographics.org just to see if there was an update ready for the next Ubuntu or Fedora. Never done that before for a "boring system package"... [1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/07/27/more-text-rendering-updates/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/07/27/more-text-renderi... [2]: The topic of font rendering always evokes responses like "Fonts look fine to me" - good for you, but this actually bothers quite some people. See also: https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

Ballas 6y ago
You wrote that with such passion that I read the articles. As a caution to people think the font rendering is fine - DON'T read the articles! You cannot unsee it. Thanks for this very informative post!
- stefanfisk 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
0x_rs 6y ago
That also killed support for bitmap fonts, a terrible shame.
- rozab 6y ago
  Which made every single glyph on my laptop a blank rectangle. I guess there's a reason people don't want to take on the responsibility for these critical packages; who knows what horrible workflows you'll break! https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ I couldn't even begin to understand why the changes required the removal of this feature. But I won't complain, at least someone's doing the hard work.
Liskni_si 6y ago
Note that just updating Cairo will not automatically bring subpixel positioning to Gtk. Pango still defaults to rounding glyph positions to full pixels (rightly so, as there's no released version of Cairo that would render it correctly otherwise), and there's absolutely no code in Gtk that would allow disabling this rounding. I reminded Matthias about this half a year ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 but it still hasn't been resolved (the issue is marked as closed but that, I believe, is a mistake). I suspect they're not going to enable this in Gtk until Cairo with support for subpixel positioning is released. Anyway, I've manually built a snapshot of Cairo for Debian: https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/master https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/maste... and I have a wrapper around Pango which enables subpixel positioning: https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf97e35286dc45b1262497/src/pango-force-subpixel-positioning https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf.... It really it noticeably prettier! :-)

by DCKing 6y ago

Ballas 6y ago

You wrote that with such passion that I read the articles. As a caution to people think the font rendering is fine - DON'T read the articles! You cannot unsee it. Thanks for this very informative post!

stefanfisk 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/

0x_rs 6y ago

That also killed support for bitmap fonts, a terrible shame.

rozab 6y ago
Which made every single glyph on my laptop a blank rectangle. I guess there's a reason people don't want to take on the responsibility for these critical packages; who knows what horrible workflows you'll break! https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ I couldn't even begin to understand why the changes required the removal of this feature. But I won't complain, at least someone's doing the hard work.

Liskni_si 6y ago

Note that just updating Cairo will not automatically bring subpixel positioning to Gtk. Pango still defaults to rounding glyph positions to full pixels (rightly so, as there's no released version of Cairo that would render it correctly otherwise), and there's absolutely no code in Gtk that would allow disabling this rounding. I reminded Matthias about this half a year ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 but it still hasn't been resolved (the issue is marked as closed but that, I believe, is a mistake). I suspect they're not going to enable this in Gtk until Cairo with support for subpixel positioning is released. Anyway, I've manually built a snapshot of Cairo for Debian: https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/master https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/maste... and I have a wrapper around Pango which enables subpixel positioning: https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf97e35286dc45b1262497/src/pango-force-subpixel-positioning https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf.... It really it noticeably prettier! :-)