kerning messed up even with correct native dpi? (was: Re: Font problem after upgrading gnome-control-center)

[Mourad De Clerck <mourad@aquazul.com>]

Hi,

I'd just like to add something:

After upgrading the new Font Prefs correctly determined my screen's
resolution to be 94dpi (if I check gconf-editor, the DPI is set at
94.45929... dpi, while the Xorg.0.log says: "DPI set to (94, 95);
computed from "UseEdidDpi" X config option").

Before I've always used 96dpi. After the upgrade I noticed the text
rendering to be "off", especially with respect to kerning. I notice this
most when browsing using Epiphany. The spacing between the letters seems
to be much more irregular.

To illustrate see the links below for two screenshots of a paragraph of
text, rendered by Epiphany, with no hinting and greyscale smoothing. I
hope you can tell the difference - the nativedpi.png is supposed to be
the "bad" one.

http://aquazul.com/debian/96dpi.png
http://aquazul.com/debian/nativedpi.png

Now it's of course no big deal for me to set the dpi back to 96, but I'm
wondering why it looks so bad - I believed that the regularity of the
letter widths and spacing wouldn't be affected whatever dpi I used.

Just wanted to let you know that even when the dpi gets detected
correctly, text rendering might take a turn for the worse.

Thanks,

-- Mourad DC