Ugly PDF display: libXft.so.1 vs. libXft.so.2 / Freetype

[moseley@hank.org]

This is on a Sid machine with X4.2.1.1

I've been wondering why Xpdf's display looks so bad compared to 
mozilla's display of web pages.  

I notice that Xpdf is linked against libXft.so.1, but Mozilla 1.4 is 
linked with libXft.so.2. 

Xpdf's display looks a lot like the example at:

  http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Acrobat (acroread) isn't linked to libXft, but still has better looking 
fonts than Xpdf, but still not as good as Mozilla.

So, my questions are:

- If Xpdf was instead using libXft.so.2 would I see an improvement in
font rendering?

- Is the issue described at http://www.freetype.org/patents.html a
factor?  That is, would enabling the "TrueType bytecode interpreter" in
FreeType2 improve fonts for my libXft.so.2 linked programs much?

- Or, is one of the problems the fonts selected in the PDF file just are 
not that great?  







-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org