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

[Franz Fellner]

Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> 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

Hi Michael,

Thx for your info! I am already on 2.8.1.
I use Gentoo and freetype by default gets built without auto-hinter.
I enable the USE Flag and everything looks much nicer now! As you said
it's not as nice as system fonts look (or firefox renders web fonts),
but it is not as painful as before ;)

Franz