Enable sub-pixel rendering
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
fontconfig (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
freetype (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
gnome-control-center (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
libcairo (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
xft (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
This is a request to the ubuntu-release team to consider a Feature Freeze Exception for patches to freetype, xft, cairo and gnome-control-
More information about ClearType can be read here, which has explanatory screenshots:
http://
With these patches enabled, the quality of font rendering in Ubuntu matches that of Windows XP and Mac OS X. We go from the right-most example in the following screenshot to the middle example:
http://
The patches are written by the FreeType upstream David Turner, and already exist in our freetype copy (but are commented out); the patch uncomments that option, and adds the necessary same patch to Xft and Cairo which are in its rendering pipeline.
My reason for wanting this to be in for Beta is that it's a visual change, and Beta is the first milestone release which gets wide-spread attention. We need a neutral, wide-spread point of view to decide whether these patches are "better" or "worse" (since such thing is highly subjective).
I propose the following:
- upload patches for Beta
- review sometime after Beta, but before Release Candidate
- if there is an overwhelmingly positive response, keep the patches
- if there is an overwhelmingly negative response, reject the patches
- if the response is largely positive, but with highlighted issues or a significant majority who prefer the older look, we revert the patch for Gutsy and enable again in Hardy and fix the issues
There appears to be broad agreement that this behavior change is an improvement for large fonts and variable width fonts, but there is fervent argument that it's a regression for small monospace fonts. Discussion on #ubuntu-devel yielded a compromise proposal to use fontconfig to select the previous LCD filter behavior for fonts with small pixelsizes. All parties seem to be happy with this proposal, so I will also be happy to accept such an implementation for the beta.