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Determine if hinting_factor setting can be dropped #9681
Description
While working out #9481, @anntzer and I have come to the conclusion that the hinting_factor setting is a relic of a different time when FreeType rendering was not so great. In essence, it causes horizontal rendering to be done at high resolution and then scaled down. However, it is not entirely clear that it is still necessary to do so.
Additionally, tests disable hinting but enable this factor (at 8x scaling). The default style enables both hinting and this factor. This makes it a bit difficult to say what the end effect would be overall.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Apr 23, 2023
This issue has been marked "inactive" because it has been 365 days since the last comment. If this issue is still present in recent Matplotlib releases, or the feature request is still wanted, please leave a comment and this label will be removed. If there are no updates in another 30 days, this issue will be automatically closed, but you are free to re-open or create a new issue if needed. We value issue reports, and this procedure is meant to help us resurface and prioritize issues that have not been addressed yet, not make them disappear. Thanks for your help!
anntzer commentedon Apr 23, 2023
We should just drop it once we can regen the entire suite of baseline images (#14538).
QuLogic commentedon Apr 3, 2025
It looks like
font.hinting_factorcame in with #719, but that was simply the addition of an rcParam for something that was already hardcoded. And someone found thathinting_factor=1with default hinting mode looked better. I might try out what they have as well.See #29816 (comment) for the effect of removing this setting.
QuLogic commentedon Apr 10, 2026
The
text-overhaulbranch is now merged.Drop support for font hinting factor
Drop support for font hinting factor
Drop support for font hinting factor