Public bug reported:

A screenshot demonstrating the issues: http://zi.fi/fonttest/fonttest-
bytecode-enabled.png

The shot was taken with Ubuntu 9.04 fontconfig-config default settings,
AA enabled, full hinting enabled, subpixel rendering disabled (in Gnome
settings). The text is written in OpenOffice (
http://zi.fi/fonttest/fonttest.odt ).

Times New Roman italic z is missing the diagonal line (or in fact it is
just extremely thin). All Microsoft fonts display bad kerning (possibly
due to OpenOffice) and sudden line thickness changes in italic text of
different sizes (hinting switching to 2 pixel lines instead of 1 pixel
would explain the change, but without hinting as is the case in italic
text this makes no sense). The free fonts (which presumably contain no
bytecode) have no hinting at all, not even in regular rendering (soft
edges on FreeSans and FreeSerif titles).

Freetype autohinter should be used at least for the fonts with no
bytecode in them and possibly for all fonts, as it often seems to
produce better results than the bytecode does. This is because the
bytecode is designed for non-AA rendering. Microsoft's workaround is to
disable AA entirely in smaller sizes, but that doesn't produce very good
results either.

I am reporting this against Ubuntu because apparently it is the patches
that Ubuntu use that break this instead of Freetype itself being broken.
Times New Roman bytecode in deed seems broken (for anti-aliased
rendering at least), but an easier and possibly better fix would be to
enable the autohinter, which seems to have very good rendering quality.

** Affects: freetype (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Bad font rendering (Freetype, bytecode interpreter)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/415134
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