Re: DejaVu fonts for Fedora Core 6 feedback call

["Konstantin Ryabitsev" <icon fedoraproject org>]

On 7/5/06, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net> wrote:
> > http://www.mricon.com/misc/dejavu-russian.png
> >
> > As you can see, some glyphs are rendering poorly, or don't match the others.
>
> This is truly horrible. Are you sure your browser uses DejaVu for
> cyrillic ?

Yes, it's DejaVu.

I'm fairly certain the reason for this is because I have freetype
rebuilt enabling the proprietary bytecode interpeter for hinting. Some
cyrillic glyphs have manual hinting information, while others don't.
Here's a very telling example:

http://www.mricon.com/misc/dejavu-sampler.png

You can see that in regular serif most cyrillic letters have hinting
support except for "ы" and "э" (they look exactly as the non-hinting
version). In bold serif, very few letters actually have hinting
information, which results in the mish-mash.

Arguably, since fedora ships with the bytecode interpreter disabled,
this won't manifest itself for anyone using the stock RPM, which is
why I don't have any objections to DejaVu making it in as the default
font. However, this is certainly a bit of a drawback for the cases
when freetype is rebuilt to support the patented bits, especially
since latin fonts benefit tremendously from the available hinting
information.

HTH.

Cheers,
--
Konstantin Ryabitsev
Montréal, Québec