Patches

A patch is a file that modifies the source code of a given piece of software, in order to alter the behaviour of said program. This page will deal with patches that were not accepted by the upstream due to a myriad of reasons, although most are ideological.

Browsers

Chromium

See Notable patches.

Font rendering

Fontconfig-ultimate

The fontconfig-ultimate patchset aims to massively improve font rendering by patching Cairo, Fontconfig, and Freetype, as well as by using the infinality patchset.

It also comes with a myriad of bash scripts that can be used to tune your font rendering further to your liking. You will probably need more fonts.

Cairo

• Changes the default lcdfilter of the FreeType rendering backend of cairo from FT_LCD_FILTER_LEGACY to FT_LCD_FILTER_DEFAULT;
• Forces Cairo to respect fontconfig;
• Adds gradient support;
• Stops Cairo from tessellating empty boxes.

Fontconfig

• Includes the fontconfig-infinality-ultimate patches to configure the infinality compliant directories.

Freetype

• Infinality-ultimate patchset to massively improve font rendering with a finely tuned lcdfilter, heavier fonts, proper subpixel rendering, and more;
• Adds ability to control stem darkening.

Giddie's Poppler Qt4 Cairo backend

The Poppler-qt4-cairo-backend patchset enables subpixel rendering of fonts via Cairo in Poppler's Qt4 wrapper (used by Okular, for instance).

This patchset will:

1. Add the Cairo backend to Qt4;
2. Set the default Qt4 backend to Cairo;
3. Force subpixel rendering in the backend.

To chime in and get the lead developer to merge it upstream, check the official bug report here.

Bugs

• Overly intense fringes.
  • Solution: patching Cairo with the cairo-make-lcdfilter-default.patch will fix this.
• Scaling of raster graphics defaults to nearest-neighbor.
  • Partial solution: https://github.com/giddie/poppler-qt4-cairo-backend/issues/6.

Zhou13's Poppler subpixel support

This patchset patches Evince, Cairo, and Poppler, in order to add subpixel support to non-Qt4 PDF frontends (like Evince) using Cairo's Poppler backend.

Cairo

• Changes the default lcdfilter of the FreeType rendering backend of cairo from FT_LCD_FILTER_LEGACY to FT_LCD_FILTER_DEFAULT;
• Forces Cairo to respect fontconfig.

Evince

• Checks whether current page supports subpixel rendering and, if it does, enables it in the Poppler backend.

Poppler

• Removes the FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING when trying to load fonts to the Cairo backend so the frontend can set the hint style;
• Provides a new function that checks whether a PDF page could be subpixel-rendered.

External links

• If you're a Gentoo user, this privately maintained Overlay will most likely have ebuilds with the aforementioned patches, behind USE flags.