Weird fonts with latest Freetype2 and Firefox

Question

This is the weirdness I have
And this is my fonts.conf that I don't want to edit if possible... I like hintslight
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
Last edited by Cimi (2007-05-06 21:14:18)

Answer 1

Thank you for advices!
I did not try to downgrade freetype, but I guess Microsoft fonts look good with older versions of freetype because there is BYTECODE_INTERPRETER enabled. Here is quote from SuSE documentation:
In order to get a good rendering of the MS TrueType Core Fonts, the BYTECODE_INTERPRETER setting should be enabled in freetype2. The freetype people do recommend not to use the bytecode interpreter anymore in favor of their auto-hinting code. But while it is true that you will achieve good rendering with most of the free fonts, this is quite ugly for the MS TrueType Core Fonts.
Well.. I do not want to enable features that are not recommended by developers :-)
What about antialiasing - I do not want to enable it for small font sizes. And, of course, antialiasing is the thing that was invented not for fixing broken fonts rendering.
I decided to replace Tahoma with Verdana everywhere to solve this problem :-) Unfortunately, I coud not do this with fontconfig - debug output from freetype shows this font list after replacement:
"Verdana"(w) "Times New Roman"(s) "Thorndale AMT"(w) "serif"(s) ""(s)
Note letter "w" after Verdana. I do not know what these letters mean, let's suppose 'w' is for 'weak' and 's' is for 'strong'. Firefox (or freetype) ignores 'weak' fonts when there are 'strong' fonts in the list. And all substituted fonts always have 'weak' marking... Thus, Firefox displays Times New Roman (or any font that was set as default in Firefox) instead of Verdana.
The final solution for me was to take fontforge, make a copy of Verdana and rename this copy to Tahoma. Now I have Tahoma replaced with nice rendered Verdana everywhere
But the question is still open - is it possible to take broken Tahoma and make same looking font that would not be broken?