[tex-live] [BUG] TeX font native hinting bug with FreeType

Benoit Jacob jacob.benoit.1 at gmail.com
Sat Oct 3 15:34:40 CEST 2009


Hi,

Please keep me in CC as I haven't subscribed.

This is to report a bug against TeX's default font. Please tell me if
I should have posted that somewhere else. I guess that this isn't the
ideal place but I didn't find anything better.

The default font with pdflatex --- which I belive is Computer Modern,
right? --- is of course a wonderful font, but suddenly when using
native hinting, it looks very bad in FreeType-based viewers.

Here's how it looks, in Okular (a document viewer that uses FreeType),
with native hinting:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/photo/ECWFmDA1TXj1jv1ymMijgQ?feat=directlink
This looks very bad!

For comparison, here's how it looks with auto-hinting:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/photo/WrTdIByZUl1opX9Mt103OA?feat=directlink
This looks already much better!

The fact of the matter is that _if_ a font provides native hinting, it
should really make sure that it at least looks better than
auto-hinting!
Thus what we see here is a bug either in the font's native hinting, or
in FreeType. If you think that this is a bug in FreeType, I will
happily redirect this report to them.

Finally, I think that the best results are obtained with no hinting at all:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/photo/keEFocEo68egvRML5oDFnw?feat=directlink
But this is only my opinion and is irrelevant to the bug reported above.

Thanks,
Benoit


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