Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sat May 02, 2009 5:42 pm

Gentoo recently added the release candidate to the main tree, so I decided to install KWord and give it a try.

However, when I started it, I found that the fonts are awful.
Here's a screenshot with KWord and OpenOffice side-by-side showing identical text:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4372/fontsi.png

The fonts look blurry as if they were an image of tiny text that was scaled up.

Is it just me (something was misconfigured or missing during the build), or is that how KWord normally looks?

Gentoo recently added the release candidate to the main tree, so I decided to install KWord and give it a try.

However, when I started it, I found that the fonts are awful.
Here's a screenshot with KWord and OpenOffice side-by-side showing identical text:
[url]http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4372/fontsi.png[/url]

The fonts look blurry as if they were an image of tiny text that was scaled up.

Is it just me (something was misconfigured or missing during the build), or is that how KWord normally looks?

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sat May 02, 2009 6:56 pm

Sounds a little like This bug

In comment #2 Thomas Zander explains what's going on.

Sounds a little like [url=https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186513]This[/url] bug

In comment #2 Thomas Zander explains what's going on.

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sat May 02, 2009 8:13 pm

Thanks, that looks a lot like it, although in my case it looks a lot uglier.

Thanks, that looks a lot like it, although in my case it looks a lot uglier.

[zander]

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sat May 02, 2009 8:53 pm

Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.

Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sat May 02, 2009 9:17 pm

Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.

I don't have subpixel rendering enabled...


Also, here's a screenshot at 400x:



The fonts are really not rendering properly. Notice that Nimbus Sans has problems too - at size 10, the 'm' and 'b', as well as "i" and "s" are colliding. It looks normal with size 12, though, and if I print it out, it also looks perfectly normal.

[quote="zander"]
Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.
[/quote]

I don't have subpixel rendering enabled...


Also, here's a screenshot at 400x:

[img]http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8538/400xp.png[/img]

The fonts are really not rendering properly. Notice that Nimbus Sans has problems too - at size 10, the 'm' and 'b', as well as "i" and "s" are colliding. It looks normal with size 12, though, and if I print it out, it also looks perfectly normal.

[zander]

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sun May 03, 2009 5:38 pm

See the linked bugreport, your case is explained totally by the comment I wrote there.
Only solution is to get a higher-resolution (more DPI) display.

See the linked bugreport, your case is explained totally by the comment I wrote there.
Only solution is to get a higher-resolution (more DPI) display.

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sun May 03, 2009 7:47 pm

I'm sorry, but I don't understand why it has anything to do with my monitor's DPI if when I zoom 400x it looks nothing like what I see if I zoom 400% onto my paper.

And I don't understand why it's better to have unoptimized fonts that are painful to read, when a word processor is most often sued to write and edit documents. Is there a way to switch to a screen-readable mode, so that I can just type up a paper and not worry that if I place my paper against the screen at 100% it will match as best as the screen can handle? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why they make fonts render nicely on the screen - if my eyes start bleeding after 10 minutes minutes of working, it's not very usable.

If KWord rendered text like its PDF output, that would have been wonderful, but the way it is now, it looks more like a scaled up screenshot than what I actually get on paper.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand why it has anything to do with my monitor's DPI if when I zoom 400x it looks nothing like what I see if I zoom 400% onto my paper.

And I don't understand why it's better to have unoptimized fonts that are painful to read, when a word processor is most often sued to write and edit documents. Is there a way to switch to a screen-readable mode, so that I can just type up a paper and not worry that if I place my paper against the screen at 100% it will match as best as the screen can handle? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why they make fonts render nicely on the screen - if my eyes start bleeding after 10 minutes minutes of working, it's not very usable.

If KWord rendered text like its PDF output, that would have been wonderful, but the way it is now, it looks more like a scaled up screenshot than what I actually get on paper.

[zander]

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sun May 03, 2009 9:32 pm

A text mode is planned for 2.1

A text mode is planned for 2.1

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Sun May 03, 2009 9:37 pm

A text mode is planned for 2.1

That's good

[quote="zander"]
A text mode is planned for 2.1
[/quote]

That's good :)

RE: Is it me or is KWord's font rendering really awful?

Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:48 pm

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. Have a look at this screenshot:
http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=34534

Kword's font rendering is just awful - especially with small fonts. It becomes almost unreadable which makes kword in some cases pretty useless. Have a look at OOWriter in comparison in the screenshot. This just looks great. Why can't kword make it like this?

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. Have a look at this screenshot:
http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=34534

Kword's font rendering is just awful - especially with small fonts. It becomes almost unreadable which makes kword in some cases pretty useless. Have a look at OOWriter in comparison in the screenshot. This just looks great. Why can't kword make it like this?