Sin asunto

freetype (2.2.1-2) unstable; urgency=low

  * Enable full bytecode interpreter instead of just the
    "non-patented portions".

> which seems to point that subpixel hinting was achieved in

Subpixel rendering and hinting are two separate font improvements.

[...]

> I have not been using MS Windows for quite a long time -barely ever
> used Vista or later versions- but I think that "Cleartype" technology
> in XP provided a crisper text

Crisper != better. I think Windows comes (well, I've had very few
encounters with Windows since XP, so they may have improved that) with a
too "crisp" setting and MacOS with a too "blurry" one. I've always loved
the default Trisquel setting for fonts, but since it allows you to
esasilly tune it up to make it behave closer to Win or Mac or whatever,
it can hardly be improved any further.

> than (even) current Ubuntu/Trisquel
> versions, particularly, as I said, on lower resolution monitors (e.g.
> 1024x768). Besides, enabling full subpixel hinting (both on Gnome and
> KDE) does not produce, I think, a perfect result (i.e. a crisp text,
> particularly on smaller characters). While web browsers seem to
> render better small characters, in Open Office in particular it
> modifies (in a negative way, IMO) character spacing and also modifies
> the shape of characters. 

That may be related with the fact that being a WYSIWYG OOo needs to
represent the fonts as close posible to the printed media, so it
probably avoids certain improvements related to screen printing.

> Provided that Ubuntu/Trisquel are alredy using bytecode interpreter,
> might these differences in font rendering between MS Windows and
> Ubuntu/Trisquel be due to using a different colour filter -as pointed
> out in 2) above by Freetype author-? Would it be possible to tweak
> that colour filter in some way to achieve that crisper text provided
> by Cleartype?

As I said, I think our font rendering engine is better than cleartype,
but fiddling with the controls (maybe changing the contour selection)
might help you.

> A last question, Trisquel 3.5 is using libfreetype
> 2.3.9, would 4.0 be using libfreetype 2.4 -perhaps that version makes
> a difference-.

No, T4 will come with Lucid's version (2.3.11). But AFAIK the main
difference in 2.4 regarding this issue is that they will enable the
interpreter by default. Since our package comes with it already
enabled it should behave the same.