[Fontconfig] FAQ update, accessibility comments

[John Ellson]

Martin,

I recently purchased a LCD panel with 1280x1024 resolution and was
also unable to get text to look clear until I upgraded my graphics card
to one that could handle lots of colors at that resolution.

I was finding that XFree86 (or the config programs) were silently
degrading the resolution to 1152x864 which was the most that the available
graphics memory could handle.    At that resolution I think the pixel 
positions
were not where the subpixel code was expecting them and I would get
varying width vertical glyphs across the page, and various  color leakages
depending on the amount of hinting selected.

All these problems went away with the new graphics card at the right 
resolution.
Text is now spectacular. 

BTW.  I also have astigmatism, but I don't find modifications to 
antialiasing
make any difference to the (lack of) focus from my bad eye.    
Antialising does not
change your ability to focus, it just affects the smoothness of the 
color transitions on
the screen. 

John




Martin Lucina wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I have updated the Fontconfig FAQ at
>
>http://wiki.fontconfig.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Fontconfig/FontconfigFAQ
>
>with a discussion of how to disable antialiased font rendering on a
>Fontconfig-enabled system. Having searched the web for some time and not
>found the "right" answer to this question, I went and figured it out
>myself. Please take a look and tell me if I've said anything bogus.
>
>You may ask why I have done this -- for me it's an accessibility issue.
>Antialiased fonts look blurry on my LCD, even with the latest
>XFree86/Freetype/GTK+2/Fontconfig. I've also tried various combinations
>of subpixel rendering settings but that seems to make it even worse, the
>result as I can see it is that with subpixel rendering I see funky bits
>of red and/or blue along with the text. 
>
>Could this be due to the fact that I am diagnosed with astigmatism
>(essentially means I use only a single eye at any one time)? Maybe
>someone can tell me what subpixel rendering looks like for them if they
>look at it with one eye closed? :-)
>
>There may be more people affected by this (or those who just prefer the
>non-antialiased rendering) and possibly it should be brought to the
>attention of the GNOME/KDE accessibility people so that we can get this
>mentioned in the FAQs and/or a preference for it in the random
>Control-Center-of-the-week.
>
>Apologies if this is not the right forum for this, but I gather that
>quite a few desktop/distro people probably lurk here.
>
>Please Cc: me on replies.
>
>Thanks,
>
>-mato
>
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