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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:       2009-09-30 13:44:57
Message-ID: d9f848520909300644p2cdb2164pa06b7ac7258b9e8c () mail ! gmail ! com
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Thanks for the informed answer!

2009/9/30 Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde@carewolf.com>:
> 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.

OK, I guess that corroborates what happens in practice with other
equivalent software:
 - all major PDF viewers (besides Okular) use no hinting
 - but MS Word does use hinting

For practical matters, i'm only going to propose a patch for Poppler,
so my opinion on what KWord should do is not important ;)

Yes, it was also proposed in comments on Sven's blog that hinting
should be disabled at least in 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.

OK, I guess that's a matter of opinion, then that is like MS Word
does; but then one should at least insert spaces between words to
compensate for hinting like MS Word does. I'd also suggest that it's
worth adding a config option somewhere to let the user disable
hinting.... Again my opinion on KWord matters .... does not matter at
all as I won't try to patch it.

About the rest of your mail below : very interesting read! I hope that
something good for KWord will result from that.

Benoit

> 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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