poor/ugly font rendering on X11 by ghostview

Mandriva bug: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=20117

wrong bug watch

upstream bug: http://www.cups.org/espgs/str.php?L1363

It is fine if upstream doesn't have resources or time to fix the bug right now, but at least, they should acknowledge that it exists. The attitude of Novell closing it as WONTFIX is rather surprising to me. (Another reason to prefer Ubuntu).

By the way, using -dAlignToPixels=0 improves the output noticeably.

Can you attach a ps file that shows this behaviour? The files I have handy all seem to render fine on my machine.

Does evince show the same behaviour?

Ignore previous comment; over the years, what you're commented has started to look normal, but I do see what you're talking about now.

evince (gs looks the same) vs:

gs -sDEVICE=pnm -dNOPAUSE -r600 -sOutputFile=test%d.pnm manual.ps -c quit

Much lighter, but more consistent, and as such much more readable. Whether this is useful is another matter

Hum, I didn't try the PNM device but now I see that that is the work-around recommended by upstream.

http://www.cups.org/espgs/str.php?L1363

Are we going to make this the default?

1. Isn't the "better" look of the pnm output only better because it was rendered at very high resolution, and so it is using the pnm viewer's antialiasing, rather than ghostscripts?
2. Does that look appreciably better than using manu's suggested -dAlignToPixels (which does indeed appear to give much better results)?

Generating a .pnm intermediary, instead of rendering properly when rendering directly, seems the wrong solution, to me.

A related question: would setting -dAlignToPixels 0 as the default be a reasonable solution for this bug?

Who are you asking that question? Even if it looks good, it may be the wrong solution. Setting -dAlignToPixels=0 seems a temporary work-around. I don't have the knowledge to judge such decision.

I'm asking anyone with the knowledge to answer. :-) It seems to me, though, that it's likely the right solution (certainly, more right than using pnm as an intermediary). I believe, though, that the ugly rendering may well be a result of the AlignToPixels feature working exactly as intended. That's basically what I'm asking.

Old bug, closing ...