Here’s a zoomed in view of the gedit File label which is rendered with cairo. 
. And here’s one of the same label as rendered by OOo currently. 
After adding my experimental cairo text render patch, here’s the OOo one again. 
. Pretty neat.
Cairo makes it utterly trivial to support text rotation, scaling and artificial oblique. All pretty neat. On the other hand currently artificial emboldening is painful as you can only get it through the cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_pattern api and not my preferred cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face, so the code to do that is disabled and we fall back to the current rendering mechanism for emboldened fons. You can turn it on in today’s rawhide OOo with export SAL_ENABLE_CAIROTEXT=1. I haven’t done any extensive testing to see if all is ok with CJK text, but I don’t really expect any problems.
Schweet. OOo being one of the few apps not to use RGB sub-pixel rendering always ticked me off (especially seeing as I use the WP part most, and that’s obviously text-intensive!)
What is the official way to switch this horror off?
Thank you for your supportive words, I will cherish them.
To turn off the “horror” you would turn it off for OOo as you currently do for all your cairo-using applications with system->preferences->look and feel->appearance->fonts. The LCDs smoothing shown here takes place for e.g. gedit etc and this proposed new OOo when “Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)” is enabled, and is then further controled with the subpixel ordering shown under details…
Checking out the back-links, I think I see what the “horror” accusation is about.
But “they did it on purpose” and linking to this post about rendering text with cairo *in OpenOffice.org* is to confuse two separate things.
All my work here means is that if there happens to be a bug in cairo rendering like there seems to be right at the moment in rawhide it would now affect OOo as well as everything else. Its a coincidence that the OOo feature has become available at the same time as the cairo bug/problem.
I see, thanks for explaining it. I figured that there must be a kind of display technology which required this, and perhaps you knew the details if you added it to Office.
Wow! Any chances of this landing in official OOo (e.g. in Ubuntu OOo) anytime soon? Lack of subpixel rendering in OOo is a major pain for me
Well, currently we’re targeting 3.0 for “vanilla”. Ubuntu inherits from the ooo-build patchset and not straightforward vanilla, so they’ll probably get it when some other group does the work to backport it into ooo-build. Sort of impossible to guess when it might appear in Ubuntu, it’s not a distro I’m intimately aware of.