Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering 360
Eugenia writes: "Font antialiasing first made its way to XFree through Qt/KDE only a year ago and GTK+/Gnome followed some time after. Even with the latest version of Freetype 2.08, which reportedly brings better quality, the result is still not up to par with the rendering quality found on some commercial OSes. David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this hack, at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results to Mac OS X's or Windows' rendering engines. Check the two brand-new screenshots ('before' and 'after') at his web page and notice the difference with your own eyes."
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
mine looks better (Score:3, Interesting)
all you have to do is add one line to your XftConfig
here is a howto:
http://jmason.org/howto/subpixel.html
Why is font rendering in X so bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like the text is always too small, too large, or not the one the developer intended.
Not to troll, but this is exactly the kind of thing that has much more effect than technical people believe.
Is it something in the design? The freely available fonts?
Re:Changing two lines of code is "hacking through" (Score:2, Interesting)
An analogy from mathematics is about how mathematicians come up with proofs to theorems. They first come up with a theorem which is a solution to a problem hoping their guess (or guesses) are correct. Then starting with the solution, step by step try to prove back to the original problem. Once they come up with a solution, it is probably 10 pages long and pretty ugly. Then they start refining the proof. At the end you have 3 lines of proof, which makes you think "How did this guy come up with this cute proof?".
Font rendering in the X server (Score:5, Interesting)
Why isn't font rendering done properly in the X server itself, where font rendering originally was done? Why must it be done client side?
I mean, the X server already knows what kind of visual you're trying to render to, so it's really just a question of getting the X server to pick up the necessary font information (transparency information at the edges of the letters if you insist on the X server itself not understanding how to render fonts). And the types used for the font rendering calls are all opaque anyway, so it shouldn't matter whether or not the font structure in the GC (on the server) stores additional information about the font being rendered, right?
All it would take in addition to the improved font rendering code in the X server is the definition of a new font server protocol that allows the transmission of more than just bitmap information to the X server from the font server and you'd be done, right?
So why isn't this being done instead of these client-side hacks that require magic rendering extensions (which are quite cool in and of themselves, but why should the client have to have a full set of fonts stored locally in order to do antialiased text?) ? The biggest advantage of this scheme by far is that you don't have to have any magic support for antialiased fonts in your toolkits: you get antialiased fonts for everything no matter what toolkit it's using (even Athena widgets would have antialiased text if the antialiased font rendering were done entirely server-side).
Or is this already what's being done, but I somehow missed it?
Re:Linux/X86 configuration standard needed bad (Score:3, Interesting)
<evangelism>
I haven't had any problems with finding FreeBSD documentation, actually. Practically everything is on the FreeBSD website or one of its mailing lists, so I don't experience problems here.
On the other hand, I get to build everything from source, so I need to do everything for hours upon hours anyway! (:
</evangelism>
Re:AA text fuzzy? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am using it right not with gentoo! (Score:1, Interesting)
Compared to Mac OS X font smoothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Overall, the Xtf hack does look quite nice. To my eye, the OS X renderings are still a bit more aesthetically pleasing, but the Xtf hack definitely improves things quite a bit.
The truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Fact 1: Hinting [microsoft.com] improves font legibility at smaller sizes.
Fact 2: Freetype doesn't interpret [sourceforge.net] the bytecodes in the fonts that are needed for proper hinting because of patents [delphion.com] detained [delphion.com] by Apple [delphion.com].
Fact 3: It uses an alternative bytecode "guesser". People may or may not like it, even though it usually improves legibility. This Canadian dude (I have the right to use this term because I am myself a Canadian dude ;)) only disabled the bytecode "guesser" because he didn't like it. Fine.
Fact 4: Rather than disabling the bytecode "guesser", enable the patented bytecode interpreter. Remember, this is illegal if you live in the U.S. and haven't licenced the patents from Apple.
For your enjoyment, I've made RPMs [linuxquebec.com] for Mandrake 8.1 [linuxquebec.com] and Redhat 7.2 [linuxquebec.com] of the Freetype library with the patented bytecode interpreter enabled.
What does Microsoft want us to obsess over today? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Font rendering in the X server (Score:3, Interesting)
1. the elements in these toolkits must be able to be defined in terms of server primitives orother elements, using a platform independent special-purpose language. And not only their appearance but also where simple interactions are concerned, such as a 'down' button that moves a slide down and a scrollable view up;
2. the server must be able to receive these definitions from the client itself or to fetch it from an external source on behalf of the client (honor server security by making sure the definition language's scope is limited to the user interface only);
3. the server must be able to cache these elements using unique identifiers by which they can be referenced. These should have two parts: a functional part and an appearance part. Clients specify an element's functional part as a requirement, and its appearance part as a hint, in order for users to be able to provide alternatives (i.e. theme support);
4. a proper encryption and authentication model for the X channel.
This makes the server able to operate more independently, instead of requiring a round trip to the client for every simple operation, making operation over low-security, low-bandwith, high-latency networks such as the internet *much* more practical.
Potentially, this would provide a lot more elegant distributed computing model than the whole mess we have now for exporting user interfaces, with http, html, the DOM, jscript and all those gross hacks that seem impossible to get right if you look at today's browsers.
What do you think?
Re:Steve Gibson debunks M$'s "innovation" (Score:3, Interesting)
You're obviously not in my first-year CS courses. Maybe its because I'm coming back to school several years older than my classmates, but christ, they're pretty clueless about technology.
If one more of them says he's in CS because programming pays well, I'm going postal.
--saint
Actual MacOS Screenshot for Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
xp (Score:2, Interesting)