SlickEdit fonts distorted after latest MacOS update

[magpie]

I have just updated my machine to the latest Snow Leopard with the update released yesterday and SlickEdit now looks much worse than before. The anti-aliasing of fonts is blotchy - as if the screen bitmap is being scaled slightly. Some pixels seem to be missing and others are doubled. If you aren't able to reproduce it I could provide a screen shot.

[magpie]

This is still bad - see http://buzzware.com.au/files/SlickEditScreenshot.png

[Scott H]

Can you try the following?

1. Close
2. Bring up the Font Book application
3. Select all fonts.
4. Validate all fonts from the menu.
5. Restart SlickEdit.

Let me know if that helps the font problem for you.

[jkwuc89]

Here is a screen shot that shows pretty clearly the font quality problem inside SlickEdit 15.0.1.3 when compared to a truly native OS X text editor.  The other editor in this screen shot is TextWrangler.  Both editors are configured to use Liberation Mono as their default text editing font.

[dmw]

Any word on this?  It's really awful.  Even with my font size increased to an unreasonable size, the glyphs still render poorly.

I've validated and removed all bad fonts, and wiped the contents of my .fontconfig directory.  No change.

[jkwuc89]

Here is another screen shot that clearly shows the font problem for the OS X version.  On the left is SlickEdit running on OS X.  On the right is the same version of SlickEdit running on a remote Linux system that is being displayed by X11 on my MacBook Pro via X11 session remoting.

[ScottW, VP of Dev]

Thanks! The screen shots are very helpful. We're looking into this to see what we can do.

[Scott H]

It looks like the 10.6.6 update did away with the /etc/fonts folder.  We read the fonts.conf file inside that folder for information about the fonts available on the system.  The easiest solution is to create the /etc/fonts folder and put the two attached files into it.  Close SlickEdit and restart it, and the fonts should render much nicer.  Please let me know if this helps.

[jkwuc89]

Dropping the attached copies of fonts.conf and fonts.dtd into my /etc/fonts directory causes several of my installed fonts not to show up inside SlickEdit.  This includes my mono font of choice, Liberation Mono, which resides inside my /Library/Fonts directory.  After choosing a font that is available, I did not see a demonstrable improvement in the font quality inside SlickEdit.

[dmw]

I'm not positive, but I think it has more to do with libfreetype that ships with the OS.  I replaced mine with one I had built last year that I had laying around, and fonts seem to have improved - but I can't be sure because I've been staring at the pixels too much trying to discern what exactly is different.

I've attached it here.  Just copy it to /usr/X11/lib and restart SlickEdit.

I'm not suggesting using this file as a solution, just to steer toward a solution.

[Scott H]

That is a big improvement!  I'll look into what you wrote more closely, thanks for this...

[jkwuc89]

The version of libfreetype.6.dylib attached in a previous reply makes a big difference.  I am also using the following fonts.conf file inside /etc/fonts:

<fontconfig>
        <dir>/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>/Network/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>/System/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
        <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>
        <dir>/var/root/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>~/Library/Fonts</dir>

        <cachedir>/usr/X11/var/cache/fontconfig</cachedir>
        <cachedir>~/.fontconfig</cachedir>

        <match target="font" >
                <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" ><const>rgb</const></edit>
                <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" ><bool>true</bool></edit>
                <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"><bool>true</bool></edit>
                <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" ><bool>false</bool></edit>
                <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
        </match>

</fontconfig>

[dmw]

Wow, cool!  I didn't think you could change that stuff without rebuilding the library.  I found this page which details even more options.  Maybe with enough tweaking we can get the fonts to render closer to Mac OS X's native rendering.

[jkwuc89]

Here is a screen shot showing how SlickEdit looks on my MacBook Pro when using the attached libfreetype lib from an earlier post and the fonts.conf file I posted earlier.

[ScottW, VP of Dev]

@jkwuc89: regarding your last post, are you saying that this has resolved the issue for that font? Please always post your evaluation. When you let us draw our own conclusion we may come to a different one than you'd expect. 

Of course, we'd love to find a solution where you don't have to do that, but I'm not sure if we'll be able to do that short of rewriting SlickEdit as a native app. Certainly, this helps us to pin down what the problem is and see what we can do within the current framework.

Doing research on this issue, it seems like a lot of people are having trouble with other applications due to the switch to Snow Leopard, and not just X11 apps either. I find that very surprising since the Mac has a reputation for not having to fiddle with such things.