Font rendering (was: Re: Flash player no longer supported, what happens to media9 and Skim?)

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

Jim,

Your point is made. I can see it.

I have to investigate first the chances that the Acrobat installation is
damaging Evince.
I have seen it happening a couple of times in the installation of our
Production Suite in
the past but thought we had left this behind now... I'll have the
opportunity to do a new
installation this next week and will try before and after installing
Acrobat.

Paulo Ney



On Sun, Aug 2, 2020 at 8:41 AM Jim Diamond via texhax <texhax at tug.org>
wrote:

> Hi everyone who cares,
>
> Attached find
> (1) a PDF file which looks (to my eyes) much better with Acroread than
>     with evince (and various other PDF viewers)
> (2) Two screen captures of the 30 pt / 20 pt / 10 pt text,
>     one for Acroread and one for evince.  Both of them claimed to be
>     showing the text at 100% scale.  I am using a 163 DPI screen, FWIW.
> (3) Two captures of xmag showing the 20 pt / 10 pt text.
>
> I will say that I am happy (happy enough, anyway) with how larger
> sizes get rendered by evince.  However, you can clearly see
> differences with the 10pt font.  The bottom of the '0' as seen in the
> xmag image is very weak, the top is weak as well.  And the general
> brightness of the 10 point text is reduced, which does nothing for its
> legibility.
>
> The xmag images show that Acroread is doing sub-pixel rendering, but
> evince is not.  (No-one has commented on this... does evince to SPR
> for anyone?  Perhaps I have something configured incorrectly on my
> system.
>
> Anyway, perhaps people can chime in with how all these things look to
> them.  Maybe its my eyes.
>
> Cheers.
>
>                                 Jim
>
> On Sat, Aug  1, 2020 at 17:45 (-0700), Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
>
> > Jim,
>
> > Please send me small PDF files showing these examples you bring about and
> > we will start a discussion. Without the PDF examples it is very hard.
>
> > Paulo Ney
>
> > On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 4:36 PM Jim Diamond via texhax <texhax at tug.org
> <mailto:texhax at tug.org>> wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug  1, 2020 at 15:45 (-0700), Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
>
>
>
> >> They do not have any experience making software for Unix and the
> >> versions they put out for Linux, Solaris, AIX, ...  were all lacking
> >> pretty seriously... it was never a contender for anything useful.
>
> >> OpenSource and other vendors did a much better job with readers for
> >> Linux and Adobe did not want to be compared to any of them.
>
> > I can't agree.  I have found no Linux PDF viewer which renders fonts
> > and thin lines anywhere near as well as Acroread.  (Well, maybe not
> > completely true... the PDF renderer in Opera at least knows how to do
> > sub-pixel rendering, unlike any stand-alone PDF viewers I've tried.)
>
> > I've also found that the stand-alone viewers I've tried on Linux don't
> > do a good job of rendering white fonts on coloured backgrounds.  For
> > example, I use white text on a dark blue background for data projector
> > slides, and I put the page number in a fairly small font (12 pt?), and
> > that is fairly illegible in a number of PDF viewers I've tried, even
> > though in Acroread it is nice and crisp.  I don't know how much of
> > this is due to SPR and how much is due to other algorithms.
>
> > The other benefit of Acroread is that it can read oms PDF docs that
> > none of the open-source readers I've tried can handle.  And sometimes
> > I have no real choice about using those documents.  (Government forms;
> > I've tried arguing with people in the government, and I may as well go
> > down to the ocean and try to keep the tide from coming in.)
>
> > I am not an Adobe fan, but credit where credit is due.  Even if it is
> > only a tiny amount of credit.
>
>
> > Perhaps your experience is different, or you have found better PDF
> > viewers than I have.  If you have a recommendation, I'd be happy to
> > hear it, because having to mess around to get a 32-bit executable
> > (Acroread 9.5.5) to run on a 64-bit only system is a nuisance.
>
> > Cheers.
>
> > Jim
>
> --
> Dr. Jim Diamond       "Convenio ergo sum"      |                        /"\
> Jodrey School of Computer Science              | ASCII Ribbon Campaign  \ /
> Acadia University, Wolfville NS Canada B4P 2R6 |  http://arc.pasp.de/    x
> Voice: (902) 585-1402    Fax: (902) 585-1067   |                        / \
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20200802/ad1976b1/attachment.html>