Current64 - May 16 updates - freetype 2.8: dejavu sans 10 looks different
 

Current64 XFCE - Tue May 16 20:11:03 UTC 2017 updates - l/freetype-2.8-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded

The dejavu sans 10 font looks somewhat more taller and narrower than before, whereas the 9 and 11 fonts look the same.
Also the font for the menu (which is supposed to be dejavu sans 10) looks smaller.
Anyone else seeing this too?
:D

I'm seeing font differences in Thunderbird specifically. Not sure if this is related but my standard font setting for writing emails was Helvetica/Arial Medium. This now results in a larger looking font ...

DejaVu Sans Book at 10 does look significantly taller than Liberation Sans Regular, Luxi Sans Regular, and Nimbus Sans Regular at the same size (which in comparison all seem very uniform to each other).

At size 11, they are far more uniform and mostly seem to differ in condensedness (width), which DejaVu Sans is known for anyway.

I can't say I noticed a change between the versions of freetype, but I wasn't paying attention, so it's possible. Whether the font or render is at fault I couldn't guess.

Yes I am having this issue also with Deja Vu and Arial fonts. I am slowly making the transition to liberation fonts and haven't really bothered to investigate this yet.

For the time being I rolled back to freetype 2.7.1 -- and blacklisted freetype for slackpkg. I know that there is a CVE, but the risk seems minor for me.

The liberation fonts with freetype 2.8 seem acceptable to me, as do the noto fonts. Curiously enough their size 10 is too small as compared to my dejavu sans at 10 (with freetype 2.7.1.

I will return to things in due time.
:D

I'm not on Slack, but the problem appears in Arch too (freetype2 2.8), in my case Iosevka Term is concerned in i3bar/i3block/dmenu and gvim but not in urxvt/vim.

I tried with Consolas/Fira Mono and there are no problems, Now I don't know if it's a bug or just a change in the font rendering. :confused:

Looking again at the changelog I see this...
Also see this post on the freetype mailing list with a response from the freetype developer.
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html.../msg00010.html

Ok after reading the above information I recompiled freetype 2.8 with the #define AF_CONFIG_OPTION_TT_SIZE_METRICS option re-enabled in the include/freetype/config/ftoption.h file and it does restore the look of previous releases. However given the fact that the freetype developer states that this is actually a long standing bug and recommends NOT to re-enable this feature I am personally not going to do it, but I can confirm that will "fix" your font rendering problem if you want to re-enable this option in the build. If you want to enable it quickly just add this sed line to the build script.

sed -i "929i #define AF_CONFIG_OPTION_TT_SIZE_METRICS" include/freetype/config/ftoption.h

You're right, it's a bug correction, according to Arch reddit, the "fix" with #define AF_CONFIG_OPTION_TT_SIZE_METRICS works too. But I prefer to keep the "new original" version.
For me the big difference appears only with Iosevka, so I just recompiled the font with a custom value for "width" parameter (500 -> 525).
The result is very good even better than before :)

Thanks for your time.

@kh3phr3n: May I ask how you did that? I downloaded the https://github.com/dejavu-fonts/deja...on_2_37.tar.gz source and did not find an applicable setting.
Regards, Dick
:D

Edit: I had a look at https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/...arameters.toml and noticed that dejavu does not have such an explicit parameters file ...

Indeed Iosevka comes with parameters.toml.
Many years ago, I patched the lineheight for Consolas with this: https://gist.github.com/evocateur/79238
I don't know if it's possible but maybe there is a way to make DejaVu more wider with these tools.

Good luck :)

Edit:I don't know anything about fonts, but you can find Ascent, Descent, TTFWeight, TTFWidth etc in DejaVuSansMono.sfd, you can maybe ask to the maintainer some advices :)

I confirm with 2.8,and 2.9 font rendering is really really bad
Not only on Slackware,even opensuse.
I have tried the patch,but is still bad,i have an eye red(it happen to me when fonts are too small)

Are you describing small font sizes in Qt applications? Perhaps you could run 'qtconfig' and check your font settings.

Not only qt,general(gtk,xfce,firefox),fonts are too "small" comparing with the 14.2,of course I use the same font settings on both versions.

For gtk3, I have
in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
Not sure on xfce - every time I play there I rapidly revert to my beloved Windowmaker.
For firefox, I make use of the Ctrl-mousewheel combination.