Hacker News Reader

Comment by naner | Hacker News Reader

The funny part is that all the pieces (FreeType, HarfBuzz, Pango) are really well done, just FreeType isn't tweaked properly. :/

View on HN

What do you mean, with tweaked properly? Tweaked by developer oder user? BTW I think the droid fonts and dejaWeb look fucking awesome on my loptop. Much better than the fonts on my Windows maschine at work

Tweaked by the packager, who thinks the hinting patents are still valid and hence disables decent hinting during compilation.

How do I configure it myself? Do you have a reference?

Modify the Debian packaging files to provide the correct compilation options - sorry I'm not experienced with this as I've only made RPMs before =- but it should be pretty easy to figure out.

I think that Ubuntu enables hinting on default. According to FreeType's docs/TRUETYPE the TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER macro should be defined, should you want to enable patent encumbered parts.

On a karmic box:

  $ apt-get source libfreetype6
  $ grep -h TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE freetype-2.3.9/debian/patches-freetype/*
  -/* #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER */
  +#define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

Yeah, Windows XP's ClearType does things very badly. I was referring to this article that was posted in a different thread:

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com