With all the talk of fonts on Slack 12 lately, I now suspect that I may be somewhat font-blind.

Which looks better to you all?
Left or right?

http://www.sfu.ca/~mda5/compare.png

To me the left fonts seem jagged and skinny, while the ones on the right look rounder and fuller. (no pun)

The ones on the right look better to me even though they have lower AA settings. The bytecode is on, BTW.

The fonts on the right look way better to me, for the same reasons you mentioned

Surprising! I actually looked at the png and immediately thought the fonts on the left looked way better. Actually I am curious how to get my fonts to look like the skinny ones on the left! Fonts are so personal.

HA! eye of the beholder...

For the fonts on the left, my KDE settings are adjusted as follows (the bytecode interpreter has been turned in freetype):

Configure button for AA settings:
The exclude range is selected with the defaults (8 - 15)
use subpixel hinting with RBG
Hinting style: Full

I don't know exactly what the exclude range option is, but it sounds like turning this off might increase quality.

Thanks for your responses folks.

Actually, the exclude range option seems to do exactly what it says... unchecking it seems to improve quality.

Not sure why you would want this on.

i too like the ones on the left..

I prefer the right ones, though the left would fit if I hadn't the choice.
As said, the left rendering is obtained by disabling the font antialiasing; in this case this is the same thing as disabling it for a range of sizes.

Personally I like the left better, it seems crisper to me. In the end, it's all down to personal preference and what suits your particular monitor (I'm using a TFT display).

I have updated the pic without the exclude range option for the left-side:

compare2.png

Slight difference this time. The ones on the left seem to be a little skinnier and the ones on the right a little fatter. This illustrates the difference between hinting style full (left) and hinting style medium (right).

I think I still prefer the right side.

Wow, I should really get back to work...

The reason I prefer the font in the left side of the first example is because of how clear it is. I took your screenshot and blew it up 400% in the GIMP.
The top one is the original sample, left side.
The middle one is the second sample, left side.
The bottom one is the first sample, right side.
Zoomified!

I love how clean the first one looks!

I agree mattydee!

What settings do you have for the fonts on the right?

I've just spent an extremely long time messing about with my fonts and display trying to get a look as close as possible as the font rendering achieved on Windows with ClearType. (I'm using LCD screens). This is because in my opinion noting yet comes close the to readability of the font rendering system achieved by Windows.

There's a few things to note:

• In Slack 12, everyone knows that the bytecode interpreter has been disabled by default since the dawn of time, however, after going through the slackbuild package for freetype (to re-enable the BCI), there is another commented line that disables subpixel hinting too. I only realised this when I was unable to check the sub-pixel hinting checkbox in the antialiasing configuration in the KDE Control Centre.
  
• You should install the MS fonts.
  
• You absolutely must configure the fonts.conf file to customise the rendering settings to suit your individual tastes. With a bad configuration, it'll still look bad.
  
• There exist a few more miscellaneous patches created by David Turner which you can read about here:
  http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html.../msg00044.html
  They do make a difference.

So far I think that I probably have my fonts in Slackware setup to look about 95% like Windows. I'm putting the other 5% as probably differences in the monitor (since when I pipe it through VNC, they look near identical) - I'm using two different monitors, albeit both are LCD screens.

Here's two screenshots of what I have achieved:

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/5493/screen1qs3.jpg

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/5844/screen2rf1.jpg

Do you know which one is from which system? (I promise you that one is from Slack and the other is from Windows. )

I reckon the first one is Windows.

The page linked to in David Turner's post "non trouvee". 404. Did you use those patches to get your result?

I'm no expert on this, but doesn't cleartype (oops, I mean subpixel hinting) simply work by adding color to certain parts of the font? This somehow improves clarity for the human eye. As I mentioned before, I had unknowingly turned off SPH in the first pic, so the fact that there is no color in the first example you gave simply illustrates the absence of SPH.

It looks like you are a person who prefers no AA/SPH.

I agree. I think the first is windows as well.