[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#835273: fonts-liberation: Liberation 2 fonts poorly hinted

[Ben Caradoc-Davies]

Package: fonts-liberation
Version: 2.00.1-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

Liberation 2 fonts lack the high-quality hinting used in Liberation 1 fonts.
Please allow users to choose Liberation 1 fonts.

I have attached two tiny snapshots snippets showing a Thunar toolbar with
Liberation Sans 11pt at 96 dpi set as the desktop font. Full hinting is set in
both cases, with antialiasing and no subpixel hinting. Yes, full hinting,
although you would not believe it from looking at the Liberation 2 snapshot,
which is a blurry mess.

This problem has been known since 2012:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856239

Even Fedora has not switched to Liberation 2, not in Fedora 24, or even in the
upcoming Fedora 25. If Red Hat will not eat their own dog food, why should
Debian?
https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/liberation-fonts

Please either downgrade fonts-liberation to use 1.07-4 or split these two fonts
into two different packages as they are quite different.

Kind regards,
Ben.



-- Package-specific info:
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii  fontconfig     2.11.0-6.6   amd64        generic font configuration librar
ii  libfreetype6:a 2.6.3-3+b1   amd64        FreeType 2 font engine, shared li
ii  libfreetype6:i 2.6.3-3+b1   i386         FreeType 2 font engine, shared li
ii  libxft2:amd64  2.3.2-1      amd64        FreeType-based font drawing libra

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.6.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

-- no debconf information
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