Hi All,
As you know Liberation 2.0 is one of the feature of Fedora 18. Recent analysis and comparison with Liberation 1 it is more clear that final output of Liberation 2.0 is not as sharp as it was with Liberation 1.0. Though both are from same vendor (Ascender Corporation) hinting bytecodes are different.
Liberation2 already available in Fedora18 Beta, if one wants to install both fonts simultaneously Download [1] has liberation ttf with different family name, so one can have both version same time on Fedora. (cp to /usr/share/fonts/liberation and then fc-cache)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856239 , though bugzilla has more than 100 comments but if someone see to the attached screenshot will be sufficient for review.
I did comparison of Fedora output with Windows7 as well. But on Windows results are totally different than Fedora.
On Fedora 18 : http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/liberation/arial-sans2-sans1-arimo-testing2-... (Here Sans2 = Liberation2 , San1 = Liberation1 and Arimo = Google Croscore)
On Windows7 : http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/liberation/arial-sans2-sans1-arimo-testing2-...
On Fedora 18 : http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/liberation/arial-sans2-sans1-arimo-testing2-... freetype-freeworld Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.hinting: 1 *Xft.hintstyle: hintslight* Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault *Xft.rgba: rgb*)
In last 4 comments Mike Fabian has given even more better screenshot showing hinting bytecode which actually affects final output.
http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2012/12/liberation-20-and-liberatoin-10.htmlhas some more images
Problem is subjectivity of hinting output, each users has different opinion. So just thinking whether we should defer this feature and once Liberation2 output matches with Liberation1 then only we can go with this feature.
Thanks & Regards, Pravin Satpute
1. http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/liberation-fonts-ttf-1-07-2.tar.gz
Note: Cross posting to fonts@ , i18n@ and tests@ list for more feedback
Le Lun 3 décembre 2012 15:26, pravin.d.s@gmail.com a écrit :
Hi All,
As you know Liberation 2.0 is one of the feature of Fedora 18. Recent analysis and comparison with Liberation 1 it is more clear that final output of Liberation 2.0 is not as sharp as it was with Liberation 1.0. Though both are from same vendor (Ascender Corporation) hinting bytecodes are different.
As you wrote results are subjective and I can't stand myself windows-like font butchering (subpixel hinting, gross glyph distortion). IMHO some people are fighting a losing battle in trying to perpetuate bitmap font rendering.
Every new font is going the Liberation 2 way so I'm not sure at all investing in old-style hinting is useful at all. I've seen the very same horror cries when Luxy was dumped, and history showed they were a very small minority.
It may be best to keep a Liberation1 package somewhere and have old-style hinting fans maintain it. But I doubt they'll be able to keep up with Unicode changes. And anyway with hi-dpi screens hitting Apple customers nows, and Android tablet producers following suit, Liberation1-style hinting is going to be irrelevant in a few years. Resources would be better expanded in getting our GUI stack to work with hi-dpi before such hardware becomes common IMHO.
On 3 December 2012 21:08, Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot@laposte.netwrote:
Le Lun 3 décembre 2012 15:26, pravin.d.s@gmail.com a écrit :
Hi All,
As you know Liberation 2.0 is one of the feature of Fedora 18. Recent analysis and comparison with Liberation 1 it is more clear that final output of Liberation 2.0 is not as sharp as it was with Liberation 1.0. Though both are from same vendor (Ascender Corporation) hinting bytecodes are different.
As you wrote results are subjective and I can't stand myself windows-like font butchering (subpixel hinting, gross glyph distortion). IMHO some people are fighting a losing battle in trying to perpetuate bitmap font rendering.
Yeah, even me feel same now. It looks contradictory to achieve bitmap fonts rendeirng with outline fonts. It this case better to use bitmap fonts and lower point size like till 16 where bitmap fonts can give excellent sharp output.
Every new font is going the Liberation 2 way so I'm not sure at all investing in old-style hinting is useful at all. I've seen the very same horror cries when Luxy was dumped, and history showed they were a very small minority.
Agree. Since Croscore is also from same vendor Ascender, outline is same in fonts. Still the bytecode is different. I still not understood the reason behind the change in bytecode data.
It may be best to keep a Liberation1 package somewhere and have old-style hinting fans maintain it. But I doubt they'll be able to keep up with Unicode changes. And anyway with hi-dpi screens hitting Apple customers nows, and Android tablet producers following suit, Liberation1-style hinting is going to be irrelevant in a few years. Resources would be better expanded in getting our GUI stack to work with hi-dpi before such hardware becomes common IMHO.
Yeah, this might be reason behind changes in bytecode. Dunno do we need to wait for future in that case.
Regards, Pravin Satpute
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Nicolas Mailhot -
pravin.d.s＠gmail.com