ok #linux nerds convince me i can give up windows fixing this one 100% dealbreaker for me. why is ms sans serif rendering like shit in scite and not in windowmaker. don't monkey paw me and make it render like shit in both
@mavica_again i think i vaguely remember seeing that same font rendering issue in scite on an xp vm awhile ago, could you try a font file from a newer version of windows? would a newer version of the font be compatible with windowmaker, and for that matter is the font on newer versions the same anyway
@krishean all the ms fonts i have in this system right now are truetypes from xp, i don't think ms sans serif changed since then? (until it got outright retired anyway)
if you have another source for fonts with good hinting that can be printed without any form of antialiasing at all (something 100% impossible to google for in 2024) please enlighten me. i can't wait for 2024 linux to have a similar capability of font rendering as 1995 windows
@mavica_again i don't know a good source for fonts besides ripping them from adobe products or other operating systems, and yeah trying to search for any of them just gets seo word soup nowadays, it sucks
@krishean then in this case i don't think it's the problem of the font. ms sans serif renders just fine in XP and it happens to render the very same way in the same font sizes in the windowmaker UI. i don't know what one of the thousands of x11 dependencies windowmaker or scite uses to render fonts. the only place where it seems to not render correctly is scite. i think it's silly for a computer to have more than one way to render a font
@mavica_again i booted up my xp sp3 vm and a win10 vm, the micross.ttf from xp is 461672 bytes, and the one from win10 is 876256, so they did do something to it in newer versions
@krishean OK, I took the TTF from Win10 and refreshed my cache and restarted windowmaker and scite. Font is not the problem.
@mavica_again the monospace font looks ok though? do other variable width fonts show the same problem?
@krishean nope, nothing. changnig any other font setting and saving the scite properties immediately takes effect, so i know the settings file works.
@krishean best i can tell is gtk font rendering and gtk font rendering alone forces autohinting even if the font already carries manual hinting because gnome maintainers are allergic to bitmap fonts and fonts that are already made for low dpi. non gtk font renderers render my fonts-with-already-hinting without issues.
@mavica_again reading through the source trying to find where it renders text, it looks like it is using pango to load fonts: https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/scite/ci/default/tree/gtk/SciTEGTK.cxx#l1625
@krishean windowmaker also uses pango, which is why bdf and pcf fonts no longer load and i have to manually convert them to otb. however this doesn't affect gtk font autohinting
@mavica_again in the documentation there's a font.quality setting that seems to be exactly what we need, but the description helpfully notes "This setting does not currently have any effect on GTK."
@krishean and no amount of changing supposedly GTK settings in any one of the 50 different configuration files such as xdefautls xresources lxappearance gtk-query-settings etc have any effect on font rendering. Your computer is yours as long as you accept the maintainer's love for autohinting
@mavica_again the documentation page1 refers to some settings for buffered.draw and phases.draw, do those do anything?
1 https://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDoc.html