[webkit-gtk] Web fonts don't get antialiased

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2015-04-24 at 11:55 +0200, Franz Fellner wrote:
> Hi there!
> 
> Atialiasing works just fine for system fonts. As soon as Fonts get 
> added with @font-face
> those do not get antialised.
> For example go to http://google.com/fonts
> Firefox renders sharp fonts here, webkit-gtk (e.g. through epiphany) 
> draws stairs ;)
> 
> Is there something I forgot to configure?

Hi,

You'll need to show screenshots for us to guess what is different, but
lack of antialiasing seems quite unlikely. You'd have to have
explicitly edited your fontconfig configuration to turn off
antialiasing, or turned off the GTK+ antialiasing setting. No sane
distro would do that by default. Whatever you're seeing is more likely
to be an issue with hinting than anything else.

WebKitGTK+ 2.8 ignores your fontconfig hinting settings and forces use
of the freetype autohinter, because we've found that using fonts'
native hinting can cause some web fonts to render horribly. So you
will probably see a dramatic difference when you upgrade to 2.8, if
you haven't already. The result will be different than Firefox and
arguably worse for many fonts, but avoids serious issues with the
display of other fonts (that are broken in Firefox and Chromium on
Linux but not in WebKitGTK+, e.g. article text on cnn.com). This is
not ideal, because you can tell from the hinting when a font is a web
font and when it's a system font, but there's not really anything we
can do about this unless some font expert takes an interest in the
situation, unfortunately. :(

Michael