I’m porting an application from the Cairo “toy” API to PangoCairo (with HarfBuzz and FreeType). When I render small text using PangoLayout and output to a PNG file, I can often see uneven positioning of glyphs, relative to their neighbors and the baseline (when rotated). For example:
I saw similar output from the Cairo “toy” API, but was hoping for an improvement when using Pango. When zoomed-in, I can see that repeat occurrences of glyphs are rendered using the exact same pixel map:
I’ve tried turning off hinting, rounding of glyph positions (via pango_context_set_round_glyph_positions) and various other settings I’ve seen suggested elsewhere, but nothing has made any difference. I’d rather not resort to using pango_cairo_layout_path, but I’m aware that’s an option.
So, the question is, what’s going on here? Is there anything I can do to improve the output, or are my expectations unreasonable?
Thanks in advance!