Talk:Fontconfig

Infinality patches
Regarding Infinality: the patches are not yet in Portage so there's nothing to write about them, also author of this article is rather doubting the point of them since pretty much all font nerds consider autohinter to be the omitted for the sake of decency and, even if that has changed, author failed to find any images of direct vanilla vs. full Infinality comparison and all the other images look, frankly, bad. Anyway, the Infinality patch that adds incomplete ClearType (an MS sub-pixel rendering technology) support was recently accepted by upstream and will be available with the next freetype version. — Nfk (note moved from main page to discussion page by yngwin)


 * I am intending to get the Infinality patches into the portage tree. They are currently available in an overlay . — yngwin 15:14, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
 * That's not even an official overlay lest one of the few I`m using. *sigh* Anyway, I recommend making some comparison screenshots to understand if there's any point to Infinality, especially the autohinter part. Oh, and I found official examples which even more so make me wonder about it, in particular Infinality Times New Roman is so much worse than my vanilla hintfull RGB sub-pixel hinting with default lcdfilter that you have to wonder if it`s not some mistake or an old work in progress screenshot. Sadly I can't post my screenshot because Ksnapshot seesm to mess up colors and possibly fonts themselves making them blurrier than in reality. Nfk 16:27, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

After some weeks (I really have lost track of time) of testing, the only thing I can say is that at the moment on Gentoo Infinality is almost non-deterministic - the only known thing is that it almost always affects how fonts are rendered and I guess for the better but the way it does it is random even between install-purge-install cycles with supposedly the same configuration. It appears that it may even crash some applications. Also similar reports can be found on their official forum where even the supported Fedora 17 systems exhibit seemingly random behaviour. If you want Infinality, for now stick to Ubuntu (it has Infinality, right?) or brace yourself for some Sanity Points culling experience.