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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Font hinting: suggestion to consistently restrict its usage to UI
From:       Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-09-29 19:56:14
Message-ID: d9f848520909291256g22217969w8734fc95e5011235 () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/9/29 Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>:
> A Dimarts, 29 de setembre de 2009, Benoit Jacob va escriure:
>> Dear list,
>>
>> This is to start a discussion. If you want me to get to work on this
>> rather than just talking, i'll need guidance because i'm not expert of
>> these things.
>>
>> A KDE application, like KWord or Okular, shows two kinds of text on screen:
>> 1)  UI text  (e.g. menus)
>> 2)  Document text  (the user's document, in WYSIWYG apps like KWord or
>> Okular. Not talking about Kate here!)
>>
>> I'd like to make the case that font hinting should _never_ be used for
>> _document_ text. Yes, for _UI_ text it's a matter of taste and as such
>> it's perfectly fine. I'm saying that the configuration dialog in
>> System Settings should only affect UI text and not document text.
>
> That's where I stopped reading, you can't work on the code because you are not
> an expert (i don't blame you for that, i'm not an expert in font rendering
> either) and you are dictating a thing that in my opinion is totally about what
> people do or don't like, you don't know what people like, you have a rationale
> about why you like it that way, but that doesn't convince people they are
> wrong.

I'm not sure at all that I was being subjective there. Skimming
through comments on Sven's blog post, I found a very interesting
comment:

http://slangkamp.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/kword-font-rendering/#comment-97

This makes exactly the same case as I do, only much more expertly.
Along the way you learn that both Evince and Adobe Acrobat use
non-hinted text.

So, please consider that there are technical reasons why hinting is
technically broken in this setting.

The same comment also mentions that for KWord an alternative is
possible by inserting spaces to counter the distortion caused by
hinting. I am still not convinced as this doesn't fix the problem that
the font will look different at different zoom levels, but oh well,
what I really care about is Okular anyway.

Would you say that the Okular screenshot that I linked to,

http://imagebin.ca/view/OhF1EPt.html

is OK? And that it's just a matter of taste? I took it for granted
that that rendering was terrible far beyond what could be "a matter of
taste".

Benoit
 
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