[HN Gopher] The sad state of font rendering on Linux (2018)
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The sad state of font rendering on Linux (2018)
Author : harporoeder
Score : 64 points
Date : 2025-07-25 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pandasauce.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pandasauce.org)
| necovek wrote:
| One thing that used to be possible with Freetype was configuring
| how "heavy" hinting was: I remember the time when autohinted
| fonts looked the best with "light" hinting. They were smooth,
| non-bold and I couldn't see colour fringing either.
|
| You could also set the RGBA vs whatever pixel layout in the same
| Gnome settings dialog. Easy-peasy adjustment for a VA panel.
|
| After, it was available only in gconf/dconf or a tool like gnome-
| tweaks or similar.
|
| MacOS is definitely terrible today, but I prefer Linux over
| Windows still.
| webdevver wrote:
| the art of drawing pixels generally appears to elude free
| software. its always kind of sucked. if you're talking about
| compute shaders, its ok. but the moment it hits the screen, ouch!
| gmueckl wrote:
| Rendering can become extremely nuanced and finicky. Sometimes
| it can be solved with better, harder to implement algorithms
| and sometimes it requires tradeoffs that lead to good design.
| All of this needs time and time is a resource that is scarce in
| open source.
| zekica wrote:
| Subpixel rendering works completely fine on Linux. I'm using it
| right now, using "full" hinting and "RGB" subpixel rendering. It
| even works completely fine with "non-integer" scaling in KDE,
| even in firefox when "widget.wayland.fractional-scale.enabled" is
| enabled.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| On the other hand, subpixel rendering is absent from MacOS and
| makes it very difficult to using regular ol' 1920x1080 screens
| with modern MacOS. Yes, those Retina displays look nice, but
| it's a shame that lower res screens do not because they work
| perfectly fine except for the font rendering.
| nomel wrote:
| My first (and last) 1920x1080 monitor was 50lb CRT I picked
| up on the side of the road, in 2003.
|
| I haven't owned a _smartphone_ with a screen resolution that
| low, in over 10 years.
|
| I think it's an amazing feat of marketing, by display
| companies, that people still put up with such low
| resolutions.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That's true that they aren't interested. But I still like
| such screens. I used one quite recently, and it worked just
| fine for my needs.
| lttlrck wrote:
| It's still a perfectly serviceable resolution.
|
| Of course 16:19 pushed down display costs leading to the
| demise of 1920x1200 which is unforgivable ;-)
|
| Those 120 pixels were sorely missed.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| You can still get 16:10, they're just classed as
| "business professional" models with matching price tag.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Hm... I am reading this on a 1600x900 screen of my T420s
| Frankenpad while sitting in dusk in a German campsite. I
| ordered the screen some 10 years ago off Alibaba or
| something, and it is exactly the resolution and brightness
| I need. I hope I will die before this Frankenpad, because
| contemporary laptops are awful in so many aspects.
|
| You know... as you age, you really can't read all those
| tiny characters anyway.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It sounds like you have a proper computer anyway, do you
| really care about non-fixed-width fonts? These are office
| suite and web browser fonts.
|
| If something needed to be rendered in some particular
| way, it should have been a PDF. For everything else
| there's vim.
| perching_aix wrote:
| A Full HD CRT from the roadside in 2003? As if this was
| just a thing people had happen to them? Is this some
| elaborate joke I'm missing?
|
| > I haven't owned a _smartphone_ with a screen resolution
| that low
|
| Smartphone in italics, because smartphones are known for
| their low pixel densities, right? What?
|
| Did you own a smartphone at all in the past 10 years? Just
| double checking.
|
| > I think it's an amazing feat of marketing, by display
| companies, that people still put up with such low
| resolutions.
|
| And how did you reach that _conclusion_? Did you somehow
| miss display companies selling and pushing 1440p and 4K
| monitors left and right for more than a handful of years at
| this point, and yet the Steam Hardware Survey still
| bringing out 1080p monitors as the king month to month?
|
| Sometimes I really do wonder if I live in a different world
| to others.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| CRT resolution was moreso limited by GPUs than the
| monitor itself. They don't have fixed pixels like
| LCD/OLED.
| perching_aix wrote:
| They still had very real limitations in terms of the
| signal they accepted, and color CRTs specifically had
| discrete color patches forming discrete, fixed number of
| triads.
| jchw wrote:
| To me one of the most influential pieces of writing about
| subpixel rendering and in particular an exploration of the ways
| Microsoft got it _wrong_ was the writings by the late developer
| of Anti-Grain Geometry, Maxim Shemanarev (R.I.P.)
|
| https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/font_rast...
|
| Though to be fair to this article, Microsoft did improve things
| with DirectWrite, and yes the situation on Linux is quite bad
| unfortunately.
|
| Also bonus, a pretty great article here talking about gamma
| correctness in font rendering, an issue that is often somewhat
| overlooked even when it is acknowledged.
|
| https://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasin...
|
| Just some additional reading materials if you're interested in
| this sort of thing.
| neoden wrote:
| The article is from 2018 and that should be mentioned in the
| title
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yes definitely. I stopped reading after the OS X section
| because it was clearly talking about a different era.
| mushufasa wrote:
| I would love to see an update on what has improved and what is
| the same
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah even the flag they are talking about doesn't exist in
| Chrome anymore. Skia is the only text rendering I ever suffer
| under Linux, so whether or not Skia works properly is the
| only thing that makes a difference to me.
| scblock wrote:
| Windows has the worst font rendering of all modern operating
| systems. Wanting anything like Windows font rendering is insane.
| Windows 10 makes it near impossible to properly turn off subpixel
| hinting without also turning off all anti-aliasing, which on a
| QD-OLED screen makes for horrific color fringing. Windows 11 is
| better, but still pretty weak. Linux is roughly as good as Mac
| OS, both of which are miles better than Windows.
|
| Mac OS dropped the subpixel garbage (it really is garbage if
| you're at all sensitive to fringing or use anything other than a
| standard LCD) in favor of high pixel density screens. Sharp,
| readable text and zero color fringing. This is the way.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| With OLEDs with funky pixel layouts starting to become more
| popular, I hope Windows starts making their system less crap...
| dartharva wrote:
| Heavily disagree as a longtime Linux user. I don't know about
| MacOS but Windows has always had better font rendering than
| Linux in my experience.
| b3orn wrote:
| I'm currently using a Mac for private stuff, used to use
| Linux for work stuff, currently forced to use Windows. My
| font rendereing ranking is MacOS > Linux > Windows.
| tgv wrote:
| I rate it macOS > Windows > Linux. iOS is pretty good too,
| mobile Windows wasn't. But I'm only experiencing Linux
| graphically on a rather old monitor or through a terminal
| emulator, and macOS and Windows on a nice monitor, so that
| probably skews my perception. I wonder how many people
| observe the three OS'es through the same (or very similar)
| monitors.
| TLLtchvL8KZ wrote:
| I feel exactly the same, the font rendering in Linux drives
| me absolutely insane. The amount of hours I've spent over the
| past 15 years tweaking fontconfig, having to compile special
| patched packages etc etc doesn't bare thinking about.
|
| I don't even have to edit anything on Windows now, and when I
| did a few years ago it was only on a clean install going
| through I think what was called cleartype config, you had a
| panel of 6 images/samples to choose from and after going
| through it all everything looked pretty damn perfect.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > in favor of high pixel density screens
|
| I wish I could download an OS update that gave me a high pixel
| screen! But, uhhh, that's not how it works.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Do yourself a favour and go out and purchase a high pixel
| screen. I don't understand why people who spend a good part
| of their days in front of a computer (or employ others to do
| it), but refuse to get quality hardware. Is it worth
| destroying your eyes, posture, and joints to save this money?
| Not to speak of just the personal pleasure of using good
| hardware.
|
| Restaurants spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on
| equipment so that their staff can work more efficiently. Why
| doesn't IT people take inspiration from them and get a bit
| better equipment. It's not a luxury item.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I'm currently running a 4K 32" monitor. What exact monitor
| do you recommend I buy for my Windows desktop?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Then why are you saying you want a high pixel screen, if
| you already have it?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 4K @ 32" is not particularly high density. It's waaaay
| lower density than a phone or MacBook.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Then buy a high pixel density screen if you want to have
| one. They're really good for working with text and other
| computing related stuff, and they're not expensive.
|
| Philips have a very good one at 27 inches.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Is it worth destroying your eyes, posture, and joints to
| save this money?
|
| Not high enough pixel density causes which one of these
| again?
|
| > Why doesn't IT people take inspiration from them and get
| a bit better equipment.
|
| Are we talking about the same field where people are having
| a competition about who can build the most overpriced and
| obnoxious sounding keyboards imaginable?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Bad screens and bad illumination is bad for your eyes and
| bad for your sleep. And it's simply not as nice as
| screens with full pixel density.
|
| Some IT people and computing enthusiasts are total
| consumers, I don't disagree. But it's also the only
| profession / serious hobby where it's common for people
| who are doing it all day insist on having the cheapest
| equipment, or half broken hardware. Not in the case with
| the commenter above, who I misunderstood in some way.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| I suppose this is a subjective area. I would rank Windows on
| top, Mac as a close second, and Linux ... well, I love Linux
| for reasons other than UI.
| type0 wrote:
| it's not subjective if you use OLED screen
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I have an OLED desktop monitor and have the same preference
| order as OP
| exe34 wrote:
| Yeah I don't understand this difference of opinion here -
| Linux looks fine to me, Mac looks pretty and Windows looks
| like it's been driven over a few times.
| namibj wrote:
| > (it really is garbage if you're at all sensitive to fringing
| or use anything other than a standard LCD)
|
| Human eyes have higher spatial brightness resolution than
| spatial color resolution. At the cost of software complexity
| and mild computation overhead, a screen like a Bayer matrix or
| technology-appropriate similar subpixel layouts together with
| software that properly anti-aliases content by clamping
| brightness and color resolution separately to appropriate
| values ensuring the screen will remain capable of showing the
| limit frequency and that the two limits are sufficiently close
| to not disturb the eyes/viewer, will result in better viewing
| than if you lazily forcibly clamp the brightness and color
| resolution to the same value as Apple did.
|
| If you have a non-"default" screen subpixel layout then you
| need to remain able to drive each subpixel individually from
| the computer and to have the antialiasing algorithm be aware of
| the specific arrangement you have.
|
| And no, until you can point me to a sub-2000$ (and at that
| price and that poor contrast, a minimum of 120 Hz) 35~55"
| screen with at least 2500:1 static contrast, a vaguely 16:9
| aspect ratio (though I'll accept 4:3 with the same pixel count
| and density and accordingly scaled dimensions), and at least
| 10k individually addressed (and anti-aliased onto by the font
| rendering) horizontal pixels, I'll happily stay with my 11520
| horizontal (sub-)pixels that I paid about 700$ for (43", 5000:1
| static contrast, 60Hz).
| whalesalad wrote:
| I can't really agree with this at all. I am a very design-heavy
| person who has been using a Mac professionally since the x86
| transition, and have very strong opinions about font rendering,
| color accuracy, etc. About 2 years ago, I built a beast of a
| Linux workstation and use it with a 5K Apple Studio Display.
| Everything looks flawless and pixel perfect.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Yeah, I'm happy with my Linux font rendering for sure, and I
| would say generally it's more Apple-esque, so some reasonably
| large degree of this is just opinion and preference.
|
| There was definitely a time when, to get good results, you had
| to do a lot more tweaking, setting things in fontconfig, using
| patched Freetype, but I don't really experience that anymore
| now for quite some time. I do still bring around a fonts.conf
| to my machines basically out of habit... the only relevant
| thing it does now probably is disable embedded bitmaps.
|
| It's always a little bit of whiplash seeing how different this
| very site looks when I occasionally am on a Windows machine,
| with Verdana rendering quite differently there, and to my mind,
| worse.
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| Could be that it changed in Linux a lot in the last few years.
| The article is from 2018.
| ivape wrote:
| I still don't know why MacOS can't render sharp text on 1440p
| external monitor.
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| Because 1440p is not a sharp external monitor.
| sunnyps wrote:
| Ever heard of subpixel rendering? You can have pretty sharp
| text at even 90 ppi if your OS supports it. MacOS doesn't,
| probably because they didn't want the complexity of
| supporting it throughout their compositing/graphics stack,
| and also likely because Apple doesn't sell any low ppi
| displays.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Well see Apple doesn't sell 1440p external monitors, so the
| answer is you should stop using that trash and move to one that
| brute forces the sharpness problem and costs way too much
| because it has an Apple logo on it
| kstrauser wrote:
| Cute, but irrelevant. I just searched Amazon for "4k monitor
| 27 inch" and there are any number of highly rated screens
| from recognizable brands for around $200.
|
| You don't have to splurge to get a 2160p monitor that a Mac
| will love.
| ivape wrote:
| Those monitors kind of suck. You can only get $200 if it's
| a crappy VA panel at 60hz. My 1440p monitor is a lot
| better, but apparently not supported by Mac for ideal
| rendering.
| initramfs wrote:
| actually they do (or did): https://www.backmarket.com/en-
| us/p/27-inch-monitor-2560-x-14...
|
| https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-27-inch-
| Monitor-2560-x-1440...
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Because they want to sell you a Retina(tm) monitor. I wish I
| was making a joke.
|
| Roll back to a version of OSX that predates Retina, and _all_
| of your monitors get the expected Mac-like font rendering,
| Retina or not. Go to 10.7 or newer, and all monitors are ran
| using the Retina tuning for font rendering, which makes it very
| smeary and blurry on normal monitors, but looks great on
| anything that triggers Retina rendering.
|
| So, what I've been advising to the fewer and fewer Mac owners I
| know that want multi-monitor: only buy 4k monitors, OSX thinks
| they're HiDPI and won't fuck over your font rendering. At
| least, they won't _today_.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Because Apple doesn't sell 1440p monitors and they don't care
| about Non-Apple hardware.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Because they dumped subpixel rendering from their OS.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What's wrong with the v35 freetype picture? He writes like it is
| immediately obvious, but it seems fine.
| jchw wrote:
| See the jump from 17pt to 18pt? That's wrong. (Also, the small
| sizes are just completely obliterated IMO.) Font outlines are
| scalable; they should have the same relative weight no matter
| what pt/px size you render them at, and they should have the
| same proportions. Non-scalable rendering is incorrect (although
| techniques like hinting and gridfitting do intentionally
| sacrifice scalability for better legibility, but I argue you
| can do better in most cases.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Who cares? That only matters if you have a bizarre document
| that is incrementing through all the font sizes.
| jchw wrote:
| Well, because it literally _distorts the glyphs_ and thus
| doesn 't actually look right, it would be like if some of
| the pixels on your screen were inexplicably the wrong color
| due to a color management issue. In some cases the
| distortion is really bad and doesn't even really improve
| legibility at all, so it's just a plain lose/lose. If you
| don't give a shit about typography in the least and don't
| care about the visual weight of text then fine, but not
| caring doesn't mean the behavior is correct by any means.
| (And keep in mind, you will _often_ have more than one font
| size of text on screen at once, so this distortion will
| change the relative weight of fonts incorrectly, aside from
| also distorting the actual shape of glyphs.)
|
| But OK, other than just being incorrect, does it matter?
| Many people don't have proper color management in their
| software and it's usually fine. Well, yes, sometimes it
| matters. For one thing, this issue really screwed up
| scaling in Win32 and even GTK+2, because if you tried to
| render dialogs with different font sizes it would
| completely change the UI and screw up some of the component
| sizing. OK, though, you can fix that by just not using a
| fixed layout. However, you still run into this problem if
| you want to render something that actually does have a
| specific layout. The most obvious example of how this can
| be a serious problem is something like Microsoft Word that
| is meant to give you a WYSIWYG view of a document on paper,
| but the paper is 300+ DPI and the poor screen is only 96
| DPI.
|
| Maybe most importantly, _this is all pointless_! We don 't
| _actually_ have to settle for these concessions for Latin
| script text on 96 DPI screens. Seriously, we really don 't.
| I recommend this (old) article for a dive into the problems
| caused by non-scalable font rendering and how it could've
| probably been solved all along:
|
| https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/font_ras
| t...
|
| (Though to be fair, there are still problems with the
| approach of vertical-only hinting, as it does cause
| distortion too.)
| ranger207 wrote:
| I think Linux font rendering looks fine (although it has
| noticeably gotten better since this post was last updated in
| 2019) but I absolutely agree that MacOS has the worst looking
| font rendering. And I was using it on a genuine MacBook Pro!
| Discussions otherwise have convinced my that apparently font
| rendering just isn't objective but is opinion based
| RGBCube wrote:
| Almost MacOS-tier font rendering, for free:
| FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-
| darkening=0"
|
| Probably only good in high DPI monitors though.
| bradfitz wrote:
| I haven't used displays with under ~215ppi in over 10 years. I
| find these subpixel opinion discussions still ongoing very...
| quaint. :)
| sunnyps wrote:
| So you haven't used a 32 inch 4K monitor which is ~135 ppi?
| What do you get at that size, a 5K or 6K monitor? Not many of
| those available and they have specific requirements like higher
| display port or thunderbolt bandwidth.
|
| There's also an entire world of users still on 720p and 1080p
| displays. They deserve better font rendering even if it doesn't
| affect us personally.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Maybe you can afford such a display. But I still like regular
| HD displays because they are cheap and functional.
| initramfs wrote:
| this is excellent. I know what they mean on Windows. Because not
| all linux distros support ClearType-like fonts out of the box.
| RGBCube wrote:
| @dang, post is from 2018, so adding (2018) to the title may help
| as the current state of font rendering on Linux is pretty fine.
| tomhow wrote:
| Added, thanks!
| uncircle wrote:
| (2019)
|
| In the era of 4k screens, modern Linux distros have great font
| rendering and I won't take Windows as an example of "good
| rendering", unless font distortion because of strong hinting is a
| metric of quality. It is just atrocious to my eyes.
|
| It's pretty easy to be honest: have a high-enough resolution
| screen, enable greyscale mode (instead of subpixel), turn off
| hinting. Usually only the latter has to be changed in the
| settings, as many Linux users still use 1080p screen that benefit
| from font hinting.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's 2025, and the font rendering I can achieve on Linux is
| best for my purposes: clarity, readability, especially of small
| fonts. So yes, on a web page, or in a text editor, I _do_
| prefer small distortions due to hinting over fuzzy "exact"
| shapes any day. Text is here to be read, not marveled at.
|
| If I need to do typographic work, I can zoom in enough for this
| to not matter, or just print a proof on a laser printer; no
| screen is going to have 1200dpi any time soon anyway.
|
| Windows 10 takes the second place (I have no Win 11 machines
| around to compare), and macOS is still only usable on retina
| screens.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The sad state of font rendering on Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812358 - Oct 2024 (18
| comments)
|
| _The sad state of font rendering on Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19312404 - March 2019 (167
| comments)
| zahlman wrote:
| I keep hearing people talk about how Linux font rendering is
| supposedly so bad, but I simply haven't noticed any issues with
| it since switching from Windows on my home machine over 3 years
| ago.
|
| > There is not even a hint of any consistency in the rendering
| either, thickness is all over the place even within a single
| glyph, with different strokes "sticking" together because of the
| lack of pixels:
|
| Only the "H" looks even a little bit wrong to me.
|
| > As you can see here, indeed, OS X had sub-pixel anti-aliasing
| in High Sierra, which provided less boldness and bluriness with
| somewhat better consistency in glyph thickness. However, colour
| fringing on High Sierra is rather apparent. Rendering is still
| rather blurry, closer to the FreeType auto-hinter than to what I
| would consider an optimal result.
|
| The "H" looks just as wrong with and without this feature to me.
| Overall the new version without the feature is indeed a little
| bit "bolder" and "blurrier" - and given that it's white on dark
| grey, I'm pretty sure I prefer it that way.
|
| > Thickness linearity between font sizes on the second image is
| fantastic. But compare the overall thickness at standard web font
| size (16px) to any other option and you will see that this comes
| at the cost of making everything bold by default:
|
| Only the v35 version looks noticeably "less bold" to me here,
| although the autohinted version is perhaps a bit more blurry. But
| it's hard to imagine how "thickness linearity" could ever be
| accomplished without causing this sort of blurriness.
|
| But maybe I'm just unbothered because I grew up with "luggable"
| Mac displays and bitmap fonts....
|
| > With current state of Linux, it does not matter which engine
| you pick. They all are broken in the same way:
|
| I searched the page for matching words (or at least letter
| combinations) and the actual rendered text isn't showing the same
| issues for me as in the screen capture.
|
| > By the time I was updating this post in August 2019, Cairo
| received support for sub-pixel positioning in both xlib and image
| compositors. This means that GTK will soon have it too, as well
| as Pango and basically anything that relies on Cairo to render
| text. I am looking forward to the next Ubuntu LTS and might make
| a separate post about compiling this into the current Ubuntu LTS.
|
| ... Ah, I guess that must have happened, then.
|
| ----
|
| On the other hand, GTK has caused me all kinds of problems. The
| default scrollbar theming is obnoxious, and if you fix it, it
| still doesn't seem to be consistently applied. Firefox does its
| own thing unless you look up an obscure about:config setting, and
| even then it still seems to mess up. GTK offers this really weird
| default style for window tabs(?) that required complete
| relearning, and that's with Cinnamon being supposedly designed
| for maximum Windows-alike-ness. Then there's the continued battle
| from GNOME to try to deny proper notifications and/or a system
| tray to everyone else. And don't even get me started on the file
| chooser.
| rramon wrote:
| Font rendering isn't the bottle neck on Linux, imo it's the
| terrible default font choices of distro and desktop environment
| makers.
| omnimus wrote:
| One important detail is that fonts themselves have their own
| hinting rendering tables so authors can decide how fonts will be
| rendered on low dpi screens. This is tedious and expensive. And
| you guessed it many libre fonts simply dont do it right or have
| capacity to do it at all.
|
| Thats why there can be quite big quality jump when you compare it
| to fonts from big design teams from Apple or Microsoft. Not only
| the font might be a bit worse, the rendering/hinting is often way
| worse.
| layer8 wrote:
| Exactly. This is why whenever the release of a new font is
| being posted here (usually coding fonts), I end up being not
| interested due to the lack of pixel-level hinting.
| omnimus wrote:
| Looking ar the comments it seems that it is very subjective.
| People seem to prefer what they are used to the most.
|
| Fits with me - long time mac user i like Mac rendering, linux
| feels very similar and i like it. Windows feels like somebody is
| burning the fonts into lcd. It is probably more legible in tiny
| sizes on low pixel screens but it is too strong and not very
| elegant everywhere else.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > The traditional way of achieving this is through installing
| ttf-mscorefonts-installer or msttcorefonts. The msttcorefonts
| package looks like some Shenzhen basement knockoff that renders
| poorly and doesn't support Unicode. I suspect that these fonts
| have gone through multiple iterations in every Windows release
| and that the versions available through the repositories must be
| from around Windows 95 days.
|
| This is because these font files originate from a Microsoft
| initiative called "Core Fonts for the web" that ran between 1996
| and 2002. Before web fonts became a thing, Microsoft wanted to
| make a set of broadly available fonts that web designers could
| assume everyone had on their computers. Because Microsoft
| cancelled the initiative, the redistributable versions of those
| fonts are stuck in time. They were last updated around 2000, and
| any updated versions with further improvements or added
| characters aren't freely redistributable.
| Sunspark wrote:
| This is OK for me because I use these with full (or medium)
| hinting and anti-aliasing off in some apps, and greyscale anti-
| aliasing in other apps with the v35 interpreter.
|
| v40 with slight hinting and greyscale or subpixel works, but I
| don't tend to use the fonts that are meant to be used with
| slight hinting and later fonts can't handle anti-aliasing off
| at all.
|
| You can easily do this on a per-app basis with flatpaks.. you
| can set an environment variable with flatseal, and you can drop
| a fontconfig folder with a custom fonts.conf in the flatpak's
| var directory.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I prefer to use non-Unicode bitmap fonts on Linux. It works fine
| in programs that support them; unfortunately many programs don't
| support them in all contexts (in some cases, bitmap fonts work in
| some places but not others). When I write my own programs, I try
| to ensure that non-Unicode bitmap fonts work.
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