Comment 12 for bug 80921

(In reply to comment #10)
> You’re basically comparing Splash with Cairo, and so the fonts are likely to
> be rendered in very different ways (like different hinting methods). If you
> compare Cairo with subpixel Cairo, you should find that the letter spacing is
> identical; all that will change is that the letters will be sharper on LCD
> screens. (It is theoretically possible to take advantage of subpixel rendering
> to position letters more accurately in 1/3-pixel increments, but I don’t
> think current Cairo does that yet.)

I was aware that the comparison is flawed but I was also a bit lazy. Still the images document a quite significant improvement. And yes subpixel kerning is my next big wish. I’m afraid it will not be easy though. Conceptually the vert. stems that you can more or less still fit to the grid now will then have to be shifted, with a risk of more artifacting (e.g., consider « ill » with SR kerning).

> Any color artifacts you see are Cairo’s fault. I recommend applying this
> patch, which makes Cairo use Freetype 2.3’s (much better) subpixel filtering:
> <http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/patches/cairo-1.2.4-lcd-filter-1.patch>
> Anyway, any improvements in these areas are Cairo’s job and not Poppler’s.

The color artifacts are not that bad actually, they are worse for Adobe. I actually already have the Freetype 2.3.1 flavor and Poppler was a missing piece of the puzzle, that you thankfully created.

> On the Poppler side, all we need to do is figure out the clipping problem I
> mentioned above, and make Poppler respect the desktop-wide font rendering
> settings.

Hope you can work it out.