From kde-devel  Wed Sep 30 08:01:34 2009
From: Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde () carewolf ! com>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:01:34 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Font hinting: suggestion to consistently restrict its usage to UI
Message-Id: <200909301001.34639.kde () carewolf ! com>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=125429775027817

On Tuesday 29 September 2009, Benoit Jacob wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
You cannot make a generic statement like that. Hinting makes the text more 
readable so anything that should be read on the screen should be hinted. You 
may have a point with okular or any kind of print-preview. KWord is sort of in 
between, for page-layout no-hinting might be prefered, but for office notes or 
other documents that are never printed hinting is better. For KHTML font 
hinting is preferred.

Now the second problem. The hinting in KWord is for some reason broken and 
letters thrown randomly around. That is not a feature of hinting itself but 
some kind of bug. Compare KHTML font rendering and KWord. I don't know what 
KWord does but a random guess from my side would be that KWord renders one 
letter at a time. KHTML renders sentences at a time to support all kinds of 
script. It could be that hinting is applied so that letters match, but only of 
hinted together.

If you do want to deactivate hinting you need to access fontconfig. You could 
make non-hinted (print) aliases of all fonts using fontconfig configuration. 
This would require changing user or system configuration though. The second 
option is deactivating hinting when loading the font. Entirely doable in 
fontconfig, but you can no longer use QFont and their fontengine, atleast not 
without modifying Qt.


`Allan
 
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