Font should be optimized for common default grid sizes

[tbalbers]

I'm not an expert on fonts, but it looks blurry on my computer when compared to the terminus font. Is this by design, and is there a way to avoid it?

[rbanffy]

Can you attach a screenshot, along with details on the monitor, resolution and OS?

[tbalbers]

Yes of course, sorry for the delay (weekend was coming up :)
The monitor is a Dell P2414H 24 inch running 1920x1080 60Hz
On top you have xfce4-terminal using terminus font, and below is xterm using 3270font. Anti-aliasing is disabled in the WM.
I can also use 3270font in xfce4-terminal, but that's also blurry.
OS is debian 9 kernel 4.9.0-5
xfce4-terminal version is 0.8.3-1
xterm version is 327-2
fonts-3270 version is 1.2.20-1

[rbanffy]

I don't think I'll be able to make it as sharp as a bit-mapped font. What I could try is to include the original x3270 bitmaps for the point sizes it provides, but I'm not sure how to do it. I now have the tooling to add custom grids to the working copy of the font, so some grid optimization is now easier to do. I'll mark this as an enhancement and leave it in the roadmap.

[kilobyte]

I for one wouldn't want the jaggedness of the bitmap font; those who want it can install it already (xfonts-x3270-misc).

As for blurriness of antialiasing, you can adjust it. A typical desktop environment offers four levels of hinting: "none" (most accurate but blurry), "slight", "medium", "full". You also need to make sure the subpixel layout matches that of your monitor: I see you have it set to RGB, which matches most LCDs in landscape mode, but fails badly if the screen is rotated. Generally, subpixel gives a significant improvement so you'd want it to be on: for example, my left screen is RGB so your sample looks sharp horizontally but my primary is VRGB so your sample is blurry like hell.

[tbalbers]

Ok, sounds nice rbanffy. I'm looking into using gbdfed to create bitmap fonts from your ttf, but it's a huge amount of work.

[kilobyte]

Before expending the work, you can simulate the result by disabling anti-aliasing. Doing this from the GUI affects all fonts on the system but requires the least amount of thinking; if you're satisfied with the result, you can write fontconfig configuration (/etc/fonts/) to set this per-font.

I just tried doing so, and the result is really ugly. No wonders — rbanffy's remake is meant for vector fonts, if you insist on bitmaps, you're better off installing the originals (or strictly speaking, something earlier in the chain of remakes). Package xfonts-x3270-misc appears to ship such a version (I didn't test it, though) — you won't get new glyphs rbanffy made, but it's likely the existing charset is enough for you. Note though that most GUI programs have X fonts explicitely disabled: on Debian-based distributions, to un-disable you'd want to delete /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf; other distributions will have it named similarly.

[tbalbers]

Thanks kilobyte,
I can't get the xfonts-x3270-misc to work (they install fine, but are not listed in fc-list or xfontsel after trying both fc-cache -f and dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig)
I've already enabled bitmaps fonts in the OS.

[rbanffy]

@kilobyte is right, @tbalbers - directly generated bitmaps will be horrendous (unless I manage to add the grids and use those as guides).

The xfonts-x3270-misc idea is probably a better one. I'm on a Mac now, so I don't know what is wrong with the bitmap font package and can be on no assistance until I get back to a proper computer.