Font rendering

[Mikko]

I tried to use the Microsoft font Constantia (one of the Vista fonts) on a web page. The font looks quite different in Inkscape and Firefox. As rendered by Firefox, the font looks much heavier, almost as if it was all bold face compared to the Inkscape rendition. It's not bold, though, as the actual bold is heavier still in Firefox.

Does anyone know what the difference between Inkscape and Firefox is in this regard? Some fonts, such as the Vera family and even Microsoft's Georgia appear similar in both, but for some reason Constantia looks quite bad in Firefox.

I'm on F10, with firefox-3.0.8-1, inkscape-0.46-6 and freetype-2.3.7-3 compiled from the source RPM using '--with bytecode_interpreter' and '--with subpixel_rendering'.

[Lukast]

Originally Posted by Mikko

...
I'm on F10, with firefox-3.0.8-1, inkscape-0.46-6 and freetype-2.3.7-3 compiled from the source RPM using '--with bytecode_interpreter' and '--with subpixel_rendering'.

How did you install the MS font into Fedora? Are paths ok?

Why do you turn on bytecode_interpreter?
Does Fedora ship freetype without subpixel_rendering? Why? Smells like patents?

[Mikko]

Originally Posted by Lukast

How did you install the MS font into Fedora? Are paths ok?

I put the MS Cleartype fonts in a subdirectory of /usr/share/fonts. All programs that use Xft do see them and I can use them in Inkscape and e.g. OpenOffice. I just realized that Constantia has the heavy look also in OOo in addition to Firefox. Inkscape seems to render it better (or at least differently). I thought they were using the same code for font rendering, but perhaps not.

Why do you turn on bytecode_interpreter?

The fonts look much better.

Does Fedora ship freetype without subpixel_rendering? Why? Smells like patents?

Yes to patents. The spec file of the Fedora freetype source RPM has instructions on how to give these two options to rpmbuild when building the binary package. They are off by default.

[brebs]

Originally Posted by Mikko

The font looks quite different in Inkscape and Firefox.

Firefox has its own DPI setting, which can get messed up. See howto.

[Lukast]

Do you know about any how-to? I mean step by step instruction for building freetype with both flags?
I think other users may benefit from this too.

[Mikko]

Originally Posted by brebs

Firefox has its own DPI setting, which can get messed up. See howto.

Thanks for the link. The Fedora-packaged Firefox on my system does not seem to have the font.FreeType2.* settings at all in about:config. There is a layout.css.dpi, set by default to -1. Setting it to different values had no effect on font rendering.