ugly looking smoothed glyphs on x11aplha device

[klusacek]

Hi,

I'd like to report something I'm not sure is a bug. But I do not like this
feature a it is the reason why I refused to upgrade to 8.01 (from 7.07b). 

When using postscipt version of Computer Modern Fonts (from TeX), the
smoothed output from 8.01 looks ugly and confusing while 7.07b was
acceptable. It is so bad that some characters looks as if they were from a
different font (like 0 wich looks like boldface while 1 is looking more tiny
than it should).

The bzip2ped bmp image with the example is attached. The upper part of the
image is the output from 8.01 and the lower one is from 7.07b. The
respective .ps file is atteched too. The output device was set to x11alpha
in both cases.

The output of 8.01 did not changed even if compiled with -O0. The compiler
was gcc-2.95.3 in both cases.

I guess that there was an aim to make a new smoothing algorithm which would
get a rid of unnecessary bluring which often occurs in glyphs like `='. I
have a feeling that it might work by small repositioning of the character
(or its parts) until a minimum blur is reached. Unfortunately there are
characters that will always be blurred and maybe it is the contrast between
the sharp edges and blurred glyphs what makes the result visualy worse then
that of the old algorithm.

I think that it would be nice if the old algorithm could be used as an
alternative to the new one (like -sDEVICE=x11beta or whatever).


Sincerely,

David Klusacek