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Finding and using free fontsFinding and using free fontsPosted Jan 22, 2009 12:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576)Parent article: Finding and using free fonts
I've just looked at several of those fonts, and (like every other Free font I've ever seen) they are all unusable without antialiasing, which makes them worthless for on-screen use to me. It's like they have no hinting at all, though I'm aware that good hinting is very hard work, so I expect they've been hinted, just badly.
I've never been able to understand the obsession in the Linux world with having large blurred fonts. A default install of Ubuntu makes my eyes start to hurt within a few minutes from desperately trying to focus on blurry text, but turning off antialiasing means I have to download msttcorefonts in order for text to look even remotely decent. When I was using a CRT I assumed that the people who designed these things were using monitors that rendered them completely differently, but now I have a fairly expensive flatscreen monitor it looks even worse, because everything else is sharper.
Am I seriously the only person in the world who wants on-screen fonts to look sharp and crisp like they do when using most non-Free fonts?
(Exception: Terminus and a handful of other Free *bitmapped* fonts are extemely good)
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Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 22, 2009 16:46 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link]
Are you using freetype's autohinter, or the bytecode interpreter? DejaVu at least is extensively hinted, but none of that work is visible unless you use the bytecode interpreter.
Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 23, 2009 0:11 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
What decade are you in? Do you actually have "subpixel smoothing" turned on, on your expensive flatscreen monitor? (It's not on by default, incomprehensibly.) My LCD monitor claims to have 1680x1050 pixels, and the glyphs on it look perfectly sharp. Of course with the wrong font it looks awful, but I've found the fix for that, noted above. Before Linux Libertine I used Vera, and Century Schoolbook before that. I was never satisfied until now.
Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 26, 2009 1:39 UTC (Mon) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link]
Even sub-pixel hinted glyphs look blurry on a 1680x1050 display (I have one), if you have good eyesight. Compare with non-anti-aliased text, and the difference is stark: edges are white-grey-black versus white-black.
Some people's eyes prefer the non-anti-aliased one. It just stands out more clearly.
Personally I used to dislike that slight blurriness, but eventually I decided it's ok on a screen with very small pixels, because the letter shapes are better.
I still use a bitmap font in my text editor though. I tried anti-aliased text in that, and didn't like it. The bitmap fonts look clearer to my eyes, like the difference between clear glass and slightly frosted glass.
If you think the difference is negligable, consider that GUI elements such as boxes and thin horizontal/vertical lines are still drawn (in current GUIs) an integer number of pixels wide, and exactly on the pixels, because they look noticably clearer than drawing thin lines with an anti-aliased vector renderer at fractional positions.
Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 26, 2009 13:08 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
Few versions ago Ubuntu changed default font rendering to be more blurry. There is workaround to restore previous rendering, but is still manual workaround, not proper solution. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug...
Interesingly, when I switched to Fedora, fonts got sharp as before.
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