Try it, you'll see the difference, I promise :-) Dunno if you'll like it, but it's more noticeable than on my screenshots... I used mc because I forgot to make some screenshots before installing it.

There aren't any noticeable changes in speed, although I *think* (with my limited understanding of freetype) that with bytecode interpreter it should be actually faster. The reason is that if freetype doesn't use the bytecode interpreter, it will use the auto-hinter which has to perform some analysis of every glyph... with bytecode hinting the analysis is performed beforehand by the font designer.

By the way, are there any benchmarks for ITOS? I would be interested to see one...

Here's a animated gif from the Russian internet-tablet forum:



You can see that the renderer with bytecode interpreter gives sharper glyphs with less grayscale pixels around. Especially note the font from the URL bar, it seems properly hinted so it gains most from enabled bci. At the same time, you can see the font on titlebar has not changed at all - this is because not all Cyrillic glyphs in Nokia fonts contain proper hints.