[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#580622: Subpixel hinting makes fonts blurry

[Josh Triplett]

Package: chromium-browser
Version: 5.0.375.29~r46008-3
Severity: normal

Actually, Mike Hommey's screenshot shows the hinting problem quite
clearly.  Notice the blue pixels along the right edge of lines, such as
the 'r', 'i', and 'n' in "Version", or the colons for that matter.  This
seems indicative of insufficient hinting: trying to match the font shape
more precisely rather than snapping to pixels to avoid blurring.  (Also
commonly called Mac-like rendering rather than Windows-like rendering.)

So, it *looks* like Chromium's content area has failed to figure out
that it should do full hinting.

In case it helps:

~$ fc-match -v sans-serif | grep hint
        hintstyle: 3(i)(s)
        hinting: FcTrue(s)
        autohint: FcFalse(s)
~$ xrdb -query | grep Xft
Xft.antialias:  1
Xft.dpi:        125
Xft.hinting:    1
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.rgba:       rgb

And GNOME's appearance settings have hinting set to full as well.

- Josh Triplett

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.33-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages chromium-browser depends on:
ii  chromium-browser-ins 5.0.375.29~r46008-3 page inspector for the chromium-br
ii  libasound2           1.0.22-2            shared library for ALSA applicatio
ii  libatk1.0-0          1.30.0-1            The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libavcodec52         4:0.5.1-3           ffmpeg codec library
ii  libavformat52        4:0.5.1-3           ffmpeg file format library
ii  libbz2-1.0           1.0.5-4             high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  libc6                2.10.2-7            Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcairo2            1.8.10-4            The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3          1.2.24-1            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2     0.86-1              simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libevent-1.4-2       1.4.13-stable-1     An asynchronous event notification
ii  libexpat1            2.0.1-7             XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libfontconfig1       2.8.0-2.1           generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6         2.3.11-1            FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgcc1              1:4.4.4-1           GCC support library
ii  libgconf2-4          2.28.1-3            GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.24.1-1            The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0          2.20.1-1            The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libicu42             4.2.1-3             International Components for Unico
ii  libjpeg62            6b-16.1             The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  libnspr4-0d          4.8.4-1             NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libnss3-1d           3.12.6-2            Network Security Service libraries
ii  libpango1.0-0        1.28.0-1            Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0           1.2.43-1            PNG library - runtime
ii  libstdc++6           4.4.4-1             The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libx11-6             2:1.3.3-3           X11 client-side library
ii  libxext6             2:1.1.1-3           X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxml2              2.7.7.dfsg-2        GNOME XML library
ii  libxrender1          1:0.9.5-2           X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  libxslt1.1           1.1.26-3            XSLT processing library - runtime 
ii  libxss1              1:1.2.0-2           X11 Screen Saver extension library
ii  xdg-utils            1.0.2+cvs20100307-1 desktop integration utilities from
ii  zlib1g               1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3    compression library - runtime

chromium-browser recommends no packages.

Versions of packages chromium-browser suggests:
pn  chromium-browser-l10n         <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information