> Regarding subpixel aliasing of cubic-spline fonts in Windows,
> that is indeed my observation -- although I have no idea why
> this is the case.

Because MS is lazy? :)

Anyway, i'm attaching a new version of the patch, it puts "<format> r<revision>" after font name, but before font style (such as "Oblique"), if any.

How are you going to close this bug?

By the way https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?108057 may need to be closed as well. http://lrn.no-ip.info/other/freemono-r2910-freetype2.mng proves that this seems to be inherent problem of quadratic splines, because OTF cubic-spline variant doesn't have this bug, even though both OTF and TTF are rendered with freetype2 (so it's not W32-renderer-specific). That, or it's because of hinting and/or autohinting (there are comments and code related to hinting and auto-hinting; if you think these may affect rendering, i'll try to make these adjustable and factor them into font naming, so that i can see the effect first-hand).

(file #30856)

What i meant in the last paragraph is that W32 renderer can't do subpixel antialiasing for fonts that use cubic splines, and all OTF fonts started to use cubic splines at some point.

Anyway, here's the patch that i came up with (after a few tries i ended up modifying not just font name, but its family name).
Also, using internal svn-derived font version didn't work out that well, because then you get mismatched variants of the same font (normal font is r2906, bold is r2910, this is very confusing), so i've used svn info to get the repo version and stuck that everywhere instead.

As a result, here are some screenshots that i was able to make:

W32 renderer:
http://lrn.no-ip.info/other/freemono-r2910-win32.mng
http://lrn.no-ip.info/other/freemono-r2910-win32-bold.mng

Freetype2 renderer:
http://lrn.no-ip.info/other/freemono-r2910-freetype2.mng
http://lrn.no-ip.info/other/freemono-r2910-freetype2-bold.mng

(both W32 and Freetype2 renderers use the same Pango + GTK+-2.x + GDK-2.x stack; if used with GTK+-3.x, it would have been Pango + GTK+-3.x + cairo; fontconfig configuration is default + lcdfilter=lcddefault)

So right now i'm using OTF fonts in Firefox (it doesn't use W32 renderer, AFAIU, so it can deal with cubic splines just fine), and i can still use quadratic-splined TTF ones in programs that use W32 renderer.

(file #30855)

Right now freefonts in all three formats have the same name (say, FreeMono). Even though files have different extensions, it's not possible to install, say, TTF and OTF fonts at the same time (at least on W32).

I'd like to be able to set some kind of configure flag (patching the makefile manually would work for me too) at compile time to produce fonts in different formats that have different names (different enough for font manager to not to confuse them), and be able to install them side-by-side.

This, obviously, won't do any good for webpages and documents, which require specific font by name, and which will get the "vanilla" flavor. But for other cases (using different fonts in themes, forcing web browsers to use a particular font, etc) this is useful, at least for testing.

Since freefonts changed the splines used in TTF/OTF, OTF fonts with cubic splines were presumed to be useless on W32, but recently i was able to make GTK+ applications (such as Pidgin) work with FreeType2 font renderer, which DOES support cubic splines, and i'd like to have an opportunity to test and, eventually, use OTF fonts.