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by b215826 1116 days ago 

    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
      <const>hintslight</const>
    </edit>
I thought macOS did very little font hinting? I personally turn off hinting in my fonts.conf. Also, TeX Gyre Heros isn't identical to Helvetica Neue, which itself is not hard to find on the Internet.
1 comments
bscphil 1116 days ago
Yes, this post is nonsense. The biggest issue is that macOS doesn't do sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hasn't for many years: the "after" picture looks nothing at all like macOS!

You'd achieve macOS style rendering on Linux by:

* disabling hinting completely (don't forget the auto hinter)

* disable subpixel anti-aliasing (use only grayscale full pixel anti-aliasing)

Then you need to find a way to enable sub-pixel positioning (which uses anti-aliasing to offset glyphs by fractions of a pixel). If your applications are all QT5/6 or GTK4, you're done, because this is enabled by default. Applications that use other text drawing methods (including GTK2/3 but probably others) may need additional adjustment. I think the only sure-fire way of doing it would be to patch Pango / Cairo.

Personally, I do most of the above but leave sub-pixel anti-aliasing enabled, because it works better on my low-DPI monitor.

The advice given on the page is outright wrong for a few reasons:

* it doesn't mention sub-pixel anti-aliasing at all (and leaves it enabled!)

* the before picture appears to have less hinting than the after picture, and therefore more macOS like (??)

* it doesn't mention sub-pixel positioning at all

link