Bugzilla – Bug 133086
freetype2 kerning failures
Last modified: 2006-04-24 16:47:17 UTC
While setting up 10.0 for an office environment I noticed ugly font rendering everywhere compared to 9.3, resulting from kerning failures. See attached sceenshots. Investigating the issue, I came across this: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2005-09/msg00027.html Unfortunately, changing this seems to not have any visual impact. I recompiled freetype2-2.1.9 for 10.0, and the visual impression is back en par with 9.3 as expected. The changelog from 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 is pretty scary quantitatively, any ideas on how to get 2.1.10 play nicely? Besides this, I noticed, that the bytecode interpreter is enabled again while deprecating it in the comment above. Consequently the related link http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/2.1.3-explained.html is currently unavailable. BTW: the 2.1.10 rpm changelog notes: * Mon Jul 04 2005 - meissner@suse.de - Use system zlib. while freetype-2.1.10/include/freetype/config/ftoption.h says: /* #define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SYSTEM_ZLIB */
Created attachment 56884 [details] This is rendered with freetype2-2.1.10 as delivered with 10.0.
Created attachment 56885 [details] This is rendered with freetype2-2.1.9 on 10.0
Created attachment 56886 [details] enable kerning as noticed on freetype ML
Okay, forget about zlib note above: I noticed the config option in the make call. Here's an update: I get the best result with current cvs freetype2, but had a hard time to get it going (because of missing symbols). Therefor I attach the spec and patch for those, who want to experiment themself. Feedback welcome.
Created attachment 57819 [details] freetype2 20051119 cvs spec
Created attachment 57820 [details] apiname patch
I can see no differences whatsoever when applying a patch like the one in comment #3 to the freetype2 package currently in SuSE Linux 10.0 RC1. When testing with a command like ftstring -m "VAea" 10 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf & kerning seems to work, and on top of that work exactly the same way with and without that patch. I.e. there seems to be nothing to fix for SuSE Linux 10.1 anymore. Therefore I am closing this bug as FIXED (for SuSE Linux 10.1).