Bug 24815

Summary:	Bad quality font rendering in main PDF document body
Product:	poppler	Reporter:	Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar>
Component:	general	Assignee:	poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED MOVED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	hhielscher, nomnex
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Andrei Borzenkov 2009-10-30 07:59:33 UTC

I was told to report it here by KDE developers. KDE bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212298. Poppler version: poppler-0.12.1-2mdv2010.0. Screenshot: https://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=37952

Look at attached screen shot. The main document text appears very blurry
comparing with anything else on the screen. Actually it literally strains my
eyes to read it.

I am happy to provide any additional information; I'm just not exactly sure
which one.

Comment 1 Joshua Richardson 2011-06-05 15:59:30 UTC

The rendering doesn't look bad to me.  It looks properly antialiased, which increases blurriness, but also increases readability, as it avoids unnecessarily jagged edges.

Can you provide a competing screenshot from another utility that does a better job with the font rendering, and then reopen the bug?

Otherwise, I think this is a "won't fix".

Comment 2 Albert Astals Cid 2011-06-05 16:13:21 UTC

Hi Joshua, thanks for your opinion, but since you are not part of the poppler team (yet) i'm reopening the bug.

Comment 3 Yi Yang 2012-01-03 00:51:50 UTC

I see that text outside poppler is rendered with sub-pixel rendering while the text inside poppler is not. Is this buggy?

Anyway, one has to take into account that Computer Modern (the font used in the pdf) maybe doesn't contain any hinting, and is not designed for screen display anyway.

Comment 4 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2014-02-07 22:21:06 UTC

I think Yi Yang nailed the issue. For example, contents in Evince are not affected by GNOME Tweak Tool's font "antialiasing" setting (neither by the "hinting" setting). If I change those settings, the font rendering of everything changes, except Evince's contents area.

FWIW, I'm using Evince version 3.10 with poppler+cairo 0.24.3. As I'm suspecting, the poppler cairo backend (unlike the "splash" backend?) does not support hinting, right?

Comment 5 Carlos Garcia Campos 2014-02-08 08:03:21 UTC

(In reply to comment #4)
> I think Yi Yang nailed the issue. For example, contents in Evince are not
> affected by GNOME Tweak Tool's font "antialiasing" setting (neither by the
> "hinting" setting). If I change those settings, the font rendering of
> everything changes, except Evince's contents area.
> 
> FWIW, I'm using Evince version 3.10 with poppler+cairo 0.24.3. As I'm
> suspecting, the poppler cairo backend (unlike the "splash" backend?) does
> not support hinting, right?

right

Comment 6 GitLab Migration User 2018-08-21 11:08:09 UTC

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/528.

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.