Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Users and developers helping users with generic and technical Pale Moon issues on all operating systems.

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djgpp

Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by djgpp » 2021-04-13, 08:01

Pale Moon's fonts look broken with Medium or Full hinting. The fonts only look good with Slight hinting. Other applications on the system doesn't have such problem. e.g: Chromium, Geany,...

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mr tribute
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Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by mr tribute » 2021-04-13, 15:31

djgpp wrote:
2021-04-13, 08:01
Pale Moon's fonts look broken with Medium or Full hinting. The fonts only look good with Slight hinting. Other applications on the system doesn't have such problem. e.g: Chromium, Geany,...
I always use Medium hinting. It looks great. In fact, font rendering is one reason I can't switch to a Chromium based browser on Linux. Every font is different. If your chosen font doesn't look good with Medium hinting, try another font.

I think font rendering on Linux is often sub-optimal out of the box (people seem to like the fat Mac style). It can be fixed, but it is a huge topic and has nothing to do with Pale Moon.

I haven't used Firefox for some time, but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox should have the same font rendering on Linux.

If you are using a Qt based desktop (KDE or LXQt), then most likely your gtk font rendering will not be great by default, but this has nothing to do with Pale Moon.

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Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by Moonchild » 2021-04-13, 16:42

mr tribute wrote:
2021-04-13, 15:31
Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox should have the same font rendering on Linux.
That's probably not the case, since Firefox has defaulted to using Skia for content for a long while now so will likely look more like Chrome.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

djgpp

Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by djgpp » 2021-04-14, 05:04

mr tribute wrote:
2021-04-13, 15:31
djgpp wrote:
2021-04-13, 08:01
Pale Moon's fonts look broken with Medium or Full hinting. The fonts only look good with Slight hinting. Other applications on the system doesn't have such problem. e.g: Chromium, Geany,...
I always use Medium hinting. It looks great. In fact, font rendering is one reason I can't switch to a Chromium based browser on Linux. Every font is different. If your chosen font doesn't look good with Medium hinting, try another font.

I think font rendering on Linux is often sub-optimal out of the box (people seem to like the fat Mac style). It can be fixed, but it is a huge topic and has nothing to do with Pale Moon.

I haven't used Firefox for some time, but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox should have the same font rendering on Linux.

If you are using a Qt based desktop (KDE or LXQt), then most likely your gtk font rendering will not be great by default, but this has nothing to do with Pale Moon.
Forced DPI 120:

Image

Default DPI 96:

Image

Forced DPI 120 Chromium:

Image

Forced DPI 120 Pale Moon:

Image

(You could see the fonts is broken due to Full hinting)

Pale Moon GTK2, Official tarball.

Don't blame GTK2. This is Geany, GTK2 build, with Full hinting:

Image

Only Pale Moon has problem with Medium and Full Hinting. Switch to Slight hinting make the fonts of Pale Moon good again:

Image

(You could see, the fonts still small because Pale Moon doesn't follow system's forced DPI 120)

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Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by mr tribute » 2021-04-14, 17:54

I'm a little tired, but here are my thoughts so far:

1. In Xfce 4.12 (gtk2) with a gtk2 build of Pale Moon the Pale Moon UI font will scale according to your DPI settings. The content will not scale. Use Pale Moon zoom feature to scale Web content (put the controls in the toolbar for easy access).
2. In Xfce 4.14 (gtk3) with a gtk3 build of Pale Moon I assume the Pale Moon UI font will scale according to your DPI settings (I haven't tested yet). I don't know if content will scale in Pale Moon, because I haven't tested.

3. I guess you are using KDE. You use Pale Moon gtk2 official binary, when there is a gtk3 official binary. My first move would be to try the gtk3 binary. It will pick up your existing Pale Moon profile and it's not a problem switching between gtk2 and gtk3 builds of Pale Moon.

4. If Chromium works, it would surprise me if a Pale Moon gtk3 build doesn't work at least for the UI font.

Side note: I believe it's the job of the OS to scale the UI and the job of applications to scale content. I know this is not how most OSes work, but I wouldn't want my OS to scale content.

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Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by Moonchild » 2021-04-14, 19:13

Actually a fair point, although I would expect the x server to be the one handling system DPI, and not the DE or its toolkit individually. That would be a design flaw IMHO. Then again this is Linux.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
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Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by vannilla » 2021-04-14, 19:39

Moonchild wrote:
2021-04-14, 19:13
Actually a fair point, although I would expect the x server to be the one handling system DPI
Unfortunately the X protocol (and thus the server) was invented before the concept of DPI came into existance* and thus toolkits took on the job before the server could be made to work properly.
While nowadays Xorg can deal with different DPI values, with different results based on specific driver configurations, nobody really configures it to do that nor is there easy-to-access documentation to make it work yourself.

*I'm being hyperbolic here, but the thing is that the X protocol can't even deal with complex shapes beyond circles and squares, let alone text or scaled content.
It did receive extensions allowing a server to work with that, but see the main content of the post.

djgpp

Re: Pale Moon with Medium or Full hinting

Unread post by djgpp » 2021-04-15, 04:49

mr tribute wrote:
2021-04-14, 17:54
I'm a little tired, but here are my thoughts so far:

1. In Xfce 4.12 (gtk2) with a gtk2 build of Pale Moon the Pale Moon UI font will scale according to your DPI settings. The content will not scale. Use Pale Moon zoom feature to scale Web content (put the controls in the toolbar for easy access).
2. In Xfce 4.14 (gtk3) with a gtk3 build of Pale Moon I assume the Pale Moon UI font will scale according to your DPI settings (I haven't tested yet). I don't know if content will scale in Pale Moon, because I haven't tested.

3. I guess you are using KDE. You use Pale Moon gtk2 official binary, when there is a gtk3 official binary. My first move would be to try the gtk3 binary. It will pick up your existing Pale Moon profile and it's not a problem switching between gtk2 and gtk3 builds of Pale Moon.

4. If Chromium works, it would surprise me if a Pale Moon gtk3 build doesn't work at least for the UI font.

Side note: I believe it's the job of the OS to scale the UI and the job of applications to scale content. I know this is not how most OSes work, but I wouldn't want my OS to scale content.
1. Yes, my GTK2 PM does the same. The UI fonts do scale, but the Web content fonts don't.

2. Both GTK2 and GTK3 version have the same behavior.

3. I'm using TDE, a fork of KDE3. It's the default DE on Q4OS.

4. This indeed to be the case. The GTK3 version of PM doesn't work, too.

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