persistent issue with "s" diagonals in san-serif fonts and infinality dilemma

[xfrank]

Hi Bohoomil! Thanks for your work, it does really improve the fonts. I have two issues: one, persistent, is the central diagonal "s" (and in some fonts, also "a"): is rendered too tiny, and give an odd look to the font. This happens only in some sans-serif fonts at certain sizes (12 to 17 points at 100% zoom). Helvetica, Open Sans, Noto Sans and Source Sans Pro are the most affected. I tried different settings with no luck. Second, I installed first the "old" infinality patches, then the new infinality ultimate patches. I have a Linux Mint 17 Xfce. This is my post in the Mint forum: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=186555&p=966018#p966018 , and a previous one on the same issue: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=186480 My issue was with the conflict with MDM, that prevent to boot into the system. It can be corrected adding a parameter in the "old" /etc/profile.d/infinality-settings.sh But when I "upgraded" to infinality ultimate, the new file was completely different and did't keep the MDM correction. To circumvent the problem, I replaced the new infinality-settings.sh with the old one. OK. But this way I wondered about the infinality settings and in a moment of despair I decided to downgrade to the "old" infinality patches. It removed half of my system (1.7 GB of packages), because of the huge dependecies of the "upgraded" fontconfig and freetype files! I managed to reinstall all, but now I have a system with the infinality ultimate patched files minus the "old" file infinality-settings.sh. What is convenient to do at this point? I won't face again the dependency nightmare, is risky and time consuming. The questions are: is safe to keep the system as it is now? will I have package dependency issues when my distro will upgrade? Or I have to uninstall the "ultimate" packages? (and how, avoiding to lose half of my system). And is possible to correct the thin diagonals "s" and "a" to match the rendering of these fonts? Here is an example from the title of this post, in Helvetica 13ptx: ![Uploading Screenshot - 050115 - 18:41:09.jpg . . .]()

[bohoomil]

Could you try and re-upload the screenshot, please? I'd like to confront the problem visually.

[xfrank]

I re-uploaded the screenshot. As you can see, the "s" and "a" diagonals are too tiny. This happens only in a range from 12 to 17 ptx, apparently (depending on the zoom level). All the sans-serif fonts are affected, but not the serifs. All the system is affected: the browser (Firefox) and the programs (LibreOffice), not the desktop because I have not fonts in this size range. At the moment I have the infinality ultimate patch installed, with your default settings unchanged (except the file infinality-settings.sh, that Is the "old" infinality one. Forgot to mention: the patched fonts with infinality in general looks gorgeous. I really appreciate your work!

Here another screenshot. This is from LibreOffice. Noto Sans at different sizes:

And FreeSans. This font is more affected than Noto Sans:

[bohoomil]

Ad 1)

Thank you.

You didn't install Infinality packages correctly. Just for the reference, take a look at the shots:

I don't support other distros directly by means of ready to use scripts or binary packages. I hope to release a few bits for Fedora and Ubuntu to ease the installation process, but right now you have to either build the packages yourself or use some existing ones (by BubuXP for instance).

By the way, we don't use Helvetica on Linux: check out which font is replacing Helvetica for you with fc-match Helvetica.

Ad 2)

Don't downgrade. :-) It's generally a bad idea as it can lead to dependency issues, so it's always better to go up rather than down (it is possible to inform your package manager of an alternative library it should use instead of the official one: Fedora does it and so does Arch, in a different way though). Besides, I'm not sure in what way the runtime settings (a.k.a infinality-settings.sh) might have affected the booting of your system. What I've read about is that plymouth theme in Ubuntu/Debian might use a certain font via fontconfig, but this is done in a fontconfig config file (60-latin.conf as far as I can remember).

What exactly do you mean by using infinality-bundle on your system? Infinality patches? Fontconfig configuration files? Both?

And a note on infinality-settings.sh: the one I distribute with the patches is known to work well, without major issues. It should be used with fontconfig-ultimate settings as they both provide correct and consistent rendering. Of course, you can use the old, generic infinality-settings.sh or any custom freetype2 runtime settings, but you may need to revise it on your own to make sure that issues like yours won't happen.

[xfrank]

OK. Problem SOLVED! Thanks Bohoomil! Now my fonts are near perfect. The most beautiful fonts I've ever seen in a laptop screen! The problem arised when, in an attempt to circumvent the MDM freezing at startup, I have swapped the /etc/profile.d/infinality-settings.sh with the old one (from the previous installation of the "old" infinality bundle). But there is a cure for MDM: see https://github.com/achaphiv/ppa-fonts/blob/master/ppa/README.md (sudo update-rc.d -f mdm remove ; sudo update-rc.d mdm defaults) This way, I restored the infinality-settings.sh (infinality ultimate). And now (I guess) the system can read correctly all the infinality parameters. And load MDM without problems. My ppa installation of the infinality ultimate packages was following your ubuntu guide: https://launchpad.net/~rjvbertin/+archive/ubuntu/infinaltimate. Previously I had installed the infinality bundle with: https://launchpad.net/~no1wantdthisname/+archive/ppa. I will keep the upgraded files from your ppa (fontconfig-config 2.11.1, libfontconfig1 2.11.1, freetype6 2.5.2, instead of the 2.11.0 and 2.5.2 of Linux Mint 17). I hope my upgraded fontconfig and freetype files will not cause conflicts when I will upgrade from Linux Mint 17 to 17.1 (and the nex version).

[bohoomil]

I'm glad to read that: thank you for the feedback.

One more quick maintenance tip. There are two useful commands you can use to ensure that your infinality-settings.sh has been loaded correctly:

[1.] grep Xft <(xrdb -q) will provide you with the following output:

Xft.antialias:  1
Xft.autohint:   0
Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.hinting:    1
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.rgba:       rgb

[2.] grep INFINALITY <(env) will output the following:

INFINALITY_FT_FRINGE_FILTER_STRENGTH=60
INFINALITY_FT_USE_VARIOUS_TWEAKS=true
INFINALITY_FT_FILTER_PARAMS=06 22 36 22 06
INFINALITY_FT_CHROMEOS_STYLE_SHARPENING_STRENGTH=20

As you can see, this is the exact content of the ultimate infinality-settings.sh. If fontconfig-iu configuration files have been installed correctly -- you're @ home.

Good luck!