FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: freetype2 and font antialiasing

[Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>]

Andreas Färber wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> There was a lengthy discussion on antialiasing for font rendering as a 
> GSoC project on the OpenBeOS list. I wonder, it appears that installing 
> the latest CVS version of freetype2 (with no code changes or special 
> configure options) improves/changes the appearance of fonts in Haiku 
> after reboot, especially I notice that the "1" in Terminal's caption 
> looks bolder, with a softer 'border'. If I move my libfreetype.so symlink 
> away, after restart it is back to the old appearance.

Hm. It sounds a little like the autohinter has gotten worse again. I would 
have to see it for myself to be sure. Didn't have the time to look at it 
yet.

> i) Should Haiku really pick up libraries in /boot/home/config/lib for 
> such use?

No, I think it should not, especially not for such critical components like 
app_server. This probably needs some special treatment in the runtime 
loader.

> ii) Might Haiku need to update its in-tree freetype2?
> 
> And as pointed out in #1739, the Development Optional Package includes a 
> symlink for libfreetype.so but not the headers, and as I now found out, 
> some software packages also need its freetype-config app and the 
> pkg-config files to detect and use it. Are people expected to use their 
> own version of freetype2? That might bear the danger of breaking the 
> system if the self-compiled version becomes inusable, when it is being 
> picked up by the system.

Could you help with a patch for fixing that?

Best regards,
-Stephan