[OpenJDK 2D-Dev] Font rendering quality in Linux

[Alexey Ushakov]

Hi Artur,

> So if it looks bad with that, it will look bad on your desktop unless the font is interpreted differently.
> 
> Not true. The particular font, like a lot of the other (if you wish, I may send you example images), is badly rendered only in Java. Other Freetype apps render these fonts very well, thanks to the exceptional quality of that library.
> 
> If I run Netbeans with its standard fonts and --jdk-home of the Android Studio jdk, the GUI quality is immediately improved, thanks to the fonts rendered as expected from a properly supported Freetype.


Actually we (at JetBrains) have made some changes to use fontconfig hints in freetype rendering.

Best Regards,
Alexey

> On 16 Dec 2016, at 03:32, Artur Rataj <arturrataj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 12:54 AM, Phil Race <philip.race at oracle.com <mailto:philip.race at oracle.com>> wrote:
> 
> As I started to say on that list, it seems to me that this may be a font-specific problem.
> Fonts have hints. I've seen similar issues when the hints are poor.
>  
> Unfortunately there is no easy way to know if they are poor.
> Some clients/apps/rendering systems by policy ignore hints so they may look OK,
> but then they may not look as good on a case where the hints were good and important.
> If I knew exactly what font you were using I could look at it.
> 
> The problem is more or less visible in a number of fonts, including the standard ones used by Java in dialogs, and several very high quality fonts supplied with Ubuntu. Of course, the actual differences vary with fonts.
>  
> Also, the poor quality of font rendering of Java/Linux is known. This why there are the patches, the alternative "fixed" versions of OpenJDK etc.
> 
> 
> Oracle's builds use a one that ships with the JDK binaries (not source)
> All openjdk builds use freetype. On Linux this means Ubuntu's openjdk will
> use the exact same copy of freetype as used for rendering the rest of your desktop!
> 
> Thanks, so I was wrong. Then, it might be a misconfigured freetype, a buggy interface to freetype or whatever.
>  
> So if it looks bad with that, it will look bad on your desktop unless the font is interpreted differently.
> 
> Not true. The particular font, like a lot of the other (if you wish, I may send you example images), is badly rendered only in Java. Other Freetype apps render these fonts very well, thanks to the exceptional quality of that library.
> 
> If I run Netbeans with its standard fonts and --jdk-home of the Android Studio jdk, the GUI quality is immediately improved, thanks to the fonts rendered as expected from a properly supported Freetype.
> 

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