I'm using the Inter Display font for the system UI on a 163 ppi screen.
I use it on both Linux and Haiku. Both systems use FreeType 2 as their rasterizer and exhibit the same behavior.
The TrueType hinting engine lowers the middle strokes of letters such as E, A, B and R, resulting in visibly distorted glyphs. Since the CFF hinting engine is designed to preserve the original glyph shapes as faithfully as possible, it is a technically more elegant and more future-proof solution for UI fonts at 163 ppi and above.
On Haiku, the TrueType version was replaced with the CFF OpenType version in the official HaikuDepot package a couple of years ago, and the CFF version has been the default since then.
This is not a bug report, but advice for users and distributions: for static fonts on high-PPI displays, prefer CFF OTF because of the more accurate hinting and rasterization strategy.
An additional benefit is that the FreeType CFF hinter allows stem darkening (enable it with FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0"), a FreeType feature that does not exist for TrueType fonts.
I'm using the Inter Display font for the system UI on a 163 ppi screen.
I use it on both Linux and Haiku. Both systems use FreeType 2 as their rasterizer and exhibit the same behavior.
The TrueType hinting engine lowers the middle strokes of letters such as E, A, B and R, resulting in visibly distorted glyphs. Since the CFF hinting engine is designed to preserve the original glyph shapes as faithfully as possible, it is a technically more elegant and more future-proof solution for UI fonts at 163 ppi and above.
On Haiku, the TrueType version was replaced with the CFF OpenType version in the official HaikuDepot package a couple of years ago, and the CFF version has been the default since then.
This is not a bug report, but advice for users and distributions: for static fonts on high-PPI displays, prefer CFF OTF because of the more accurate hinting and rasterization strategy.
An additional benefit is that the FreeType CFF hinter allows stem darkening (enable it with FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0"), a FreeType feature that does not exist for TrueType fonts.