Xft Support For Mozilla 190
keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at
http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.
Nice link... (Score:4, Funny)
And am I the only one that thought "Wow, Blizzard stopped coding for WarCraft 3 to help Mozilla out?!?"
Re:Nice link... (Score:2)
LCD what? (Score:2, Interesting)
why is this patch HUGE compared to the older one that often gets supplied with the libgdkxft.so that you preload?
Re:LCD what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla is trying to move away from using gdk for its font rendering to make it more portable and less reliant on gdk. Also it should be more flexiable and faster.
I gues the difference in size comes from the fact that it takes more code to use Xft directly then to use libgdkxft. (this is kinda obvious, since the Xft using code is then in libgdkxft).
Bottom line though, the libgdkxft patch didnt have a chance to get included in main stream mozilla, where as this ones probably does.
Re:LCD what? (Score:3, Informative)
If I remember correctly, it makes use of the concept that every pixel in a LCD display is made up of a red element, a green element, and a blue element, smooshed together horizontally. So if you antialias black-on-white text by breaking down each pixel into thirds like this, you can get much finer results than if you treated each pixel as an indivisible element. Each character antialiased in this way will be faintly edged with blue on the left and red on the right, but it's not noticeable to a casual user.
I could be completely misinterpreting the meaning of 'LCD optimizations,' though.
Re:LCD what? (Score:2, Informative)
Also, the sub-pixel font rendering was in XFree86 before it was declared "ClearType" and used by MS.
VERY exciting (Score:5, Informative)
As I'm sure most of you know, most monitors use round pixels, whereas most LCDs use square or the more typical rectangular pixels. So what this means from a GUI standpoint: You need to optimize for the output device. The end result in the screenshot looks GREAT.
Good work guys!
Re:VERY exciting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VERY exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, edit your
See, this is what I love and hate about Linux. The good news is someone hacked this up and someone else documented it and now Konqueror looks *sweet* on my TiBook.
The bad news is -- how the hell was I supposed to know to do this? I mean, besides reading every comment on Slashdot until someone posted a link. (Thank you, by the way, for two excellent links.)
Re:VERY exciting (Score:4, Informative)
searching in groups.google.com has become a "reflex" for me, and it pays !!
Re:VERY exciting (Score:2)
It's not the XFree86 folks' job to give you wizzy convinient way to do it. It's their "job", if you'll pardon the term, to provide the underlying functionality.
I imagine that by the time the next rev of Gnome is integrated into the next rev of Red Hat, you'll see such an option in the Gnome control panel. If that's too long to wait, then you're not an end-user.
If it only feels too long, then you're SOL
Re:VERY exciting (Score:3, Informative)
An even better explanation not written by a muppet who doesn't seem to get it that NO, the Apple II did NOT have this first, and NO, his crappy implementation is NOT how it works -- he's only got a 1st order approximation -- can be seen here:
http://research.microsoft.com/~jplatt/ClearType/d
Oh yeah; read the papers that he links to. That's where you'll get the real scoop on the technique.
Simon
Re:Microsoft patented it (Score:2)
Given that MS have stated over and over to both other people and their own employees that they only use patents defensively -- eg. if someone sues them for patent infringement, they'll dig through their patent list and attack that company back with all the ones that they have infringed.
Of course, there's a certain amount of risk to just ignoring it. You could always license the patent. *shrugs*
Simon
Re:Pixel shape (Score:2)
Normal screens do draw a round dot but there is the phosphor mask in front of that which are the pattern you see, diffraction by the screen makes the dots themselves overlap. On modern screens each pixel is then a blurry overlapping circle cut out of a pattern of vertical stripes of red, green, and blue. There is probably a way to take advantage of this for improved antialiasing but there seems to be no control over the exact registration of this pattern with the dot location, unlike the LCD.
Oh dear (Score:4, Insightful)
Luckily I never load Render & I never intend to - after about 5 minutes of looking at KDE with it enabled I had a bad headache. That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the eyes.
I remember when the old archimedes did the same thing... it kinda worked there because they were crappy monitors anyway. With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement.
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
Re: X11 calls (Score:3, Informative)
This won't help the end-user much, but it is a huge deal because it removes the main impediment stopping all programs from immediatly switching to xft.
Normally when somebody makes an "extension" to an existing interface they write it so you cannot use the "extension" without also updating what you are talking to. This means that anybody writing a program using the new interface either has to say "you have to update your drivers" which is user-unfriendly, or they have to put in a big mess of code to "detect" the extension and then have to write two interfaces, one using the extension and one not. The real result is almost nobody uses the extension because it it too much of a pain to write to.
X is horrid with these things. Shared memory images (an interface now 15 years old) required you to detect whether the server did it and write totally different code for non-shared. The result is that the majority of programs don't use shared memory images. If they had written the detection and emulation into it, I'm sure *EVERY* program would use shared images today.
Congrats to Keith Packard for figuring this out!
Now lets see the same thing done for the rest of XRender, so we can get anti-aliased lines and shapes without having to write everything twice.
Re:Oh dear (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's an example of the Slashdot page antialiased under Mac OS X [enchanter.net]. Compare it to the example above [people.redhat.com]. How come it looks so much cleaner under OS X (practically as good as printed type) than it does under Linux? Will Linux ever support this quality of antialiasing?
Its the pdf blur! (Score:2)
Re:Oh dear (Score:2)
I honestly don't see any blurriness in the OS X screenshot at 1280x1024 resolution and 24-bit color...
Re:Oh dear (Score:2)
Re:Oh dear (Score:2, Interesting)
I run at 1600x1200 with large, scalable truetype and type1 fonts and while without AA the fonts don't look bad, with AA the fonts appear to have perfectly, continuous, crisp edges and are not fuzzy at all.
Also, with the way XFree is set up now, you can have AA on/off for different sized fonts, so if you are at a low resolution you can turn AA off for tiny fonts and on for larger fonts.
Re:Oh dear (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
I love it when people can't tell the difference between "I hate it" and "It sucks."
These statements are equivelant. Implicit in the phrase, "It sucks." is the phrase, "In my opinion." since there is no objective measure of "suckiness".
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
I'm certainly not saying that this stuff isn't useful for anybody, but you shouldn't use it just because others tell you that it's better or because you think it's superior. That's plain nuts.
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
If not because you think it's superior, just when should you use it? At random?
Or do you mean as a developer enabling it for others? I can't understand what you said if you meant for yourself...
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
That should have been: "[You shouldn't use it] just because you think that it's superior without actually comparing...
Re:Oh dear (Score:2)
Re:Oh dear (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be because Windows doesn't actually 'antialias' fonts until they get way too small (less than about 4 or 5 point), or way big (bigger than about 30 point). In the middle, it takes a half-antialiasing, half-hinting approach. So curves and diagonals get smoothed, but important high-frequency information in the font (ie. horizontal, vertical lines) don't get modified.
This gives nice sharp stems in the letter I, for example. And in 'i', the dot on top is antialiased, but the rest of the font is drawn as single-pixel lines (at least, at about 10pt on my screen it is).
It's kind of clever, and works pretty well.
Si
Re:Oh dear (Score:2, Informative)
I believe that M$ have several fundamental patents in the area of automatic hinting (which I seem to recall involves global minimazation).
So don't hold your breath waiting for Linux to get it.
Mozilla(or anything) +W2K + font smoothing = good. (Score:1)
Takes time to get used to.
But now the text looks as good as text written on pictures e.g. with Photoshop.
Depends (Score:5, Informative)
make reading less stressful for the eyes.
Look at text in newer versions of MacOS, BeOS
or Windows XP. Especially at LCD screens the
quality is absolutely convincing.
BUT you need not only a good font renderer, but
also fonts that are hinted correctly.
Re:Oh dear (Score:5, Informative)
Put this into /etc/X11/Xftconfig:
match
any size > 8
any size < 15
edit
antialias = false;
Re:Oh dear (Score:1)
Edgy (bad) fonts get blurry. Good fonts dont they get sharp. (removes the tiny edges visible).
Try using some of microsoft's truetype fonts (monotype). Here [unimi.it] they have a quite nice script for getting those fonts. Use them in kde/gnome and be amazed
Re:Oh dear (Score:2)
It may not be sharpness. If I get stuck in an environment where I have to spend a lot of time reading fonts I'm not used to, I get this kind of headache for a while too.
So now, the question is, do I care enough to try another day using the Xft setup? Will it be worth it? Who knows, but I'm gonna go have a beer and go nowhere near a display for about 12 hours....
Problem with AA in X (Score:2)
However, for large fonts, I don't think there is much question that anti-aliasing really helps. The X guys should do the same thing that Windows does and only anti-alias fonts after a certain size. (Or at least make it configurable on a font-by-font and size-by-size basis.)
(XP's cleartype on LCDs is a different story; I'm not sure how I feel about that at small sizes yet.)
what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:1)
Re:what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:2, Redundant)
Font Smoothing has been available to Windows since at least OSR2 (or Win95 with Plus). ClearType further extend this in Windows XP, and it looks REALLY nice.
X11 as others have pointed out, does in fact have support for font antialiasing. For whatever reason, Mozilla apparently needed a patch in order to take advantage of it. I'm not too sure what the technical reasons are that all applications don't just automatically take advantage of it -- but I'm sure there are people who would be willing to clearify that.
Re:what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:2)
XRender provides an all-new and much nicer interface to fonts, and it makes sense for programs to use it. However it would be nice to see a rewrite of Xlib so that attempts to use old font calls cause emulation code to be run that draws Xft fonts.
MicroSoft deserves credit for implementing anti-aliased fonts while both Mac and X people were convincing themselves it was impossible or too slow. They also deserve credit for having the balls to change their already existing font interface to draw the new fonts, despite the fact that some programs that depended on the exact pixels drawn would break and make people mad. It did help them that thier font interface sucked less than 1/10th as much as Xlib, though...
Re:what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:3, Informative)
Um, MacOS >= 8.5 has supported antialiasing by default since 1998, and there was defacto support even earlier than that in Adobe Type Manager 3.x and up, IIRC. The CoreGraphics (Quartz) antialiasing in OSX is visually far superior to what was available in Classic, but AA in general certainly not a Johnny-come-lately feature on Apple's platforms.
Re:what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:2)
Damn..... (Score:1, Interesting)
But it looks like I'll have to upgrade now - and redo all of that font junk, I hope it is a little easier this time around than the last - I can remember spening at least a couple of hours getting it to work last time......
Derek
Topic: you .sig on transgaming (Score:1, Offtopic)
I checked out transgaming and I think I like what I see, but how do we know how many people have signed up so far.
Are there statistics availible? It seems only fair for me since I would be signing up mainly as a way to contribute to Wine.
[OT] Re:Topic: you .sig on transgaming (Score:1)
They're really doing excellent work: I recommend that if anybody has Windows games, they go on over to Transgaming and subscribe. $5 a month is nothing for the quality of work they put in, and how good Wine is getting with their work. (And that's saying something, since it's $US 5, and I'm in Canada! I pay closer to $10/month!)
Bottom line: WineX, their product, works well for some games now, and will work well for many more games later. Just subscribe, you know you want to.
Yeah! (Score:1)
Re:[OT] Re:Topic: you .sig on transgaming (Score:2)
Recruiting others would be easier if I could say, we only need 19 thousand more people.
In any case thanks.
Wait for stability (Score:3, Insightful)
This new patch is great, but you shouldn't update yet. Wait until it's merged into the official release. Unless, of course, you like to try out new things, in which case go get the update.
Anyway, I look forward to getting the final version of this. (Until then, I'll just have to buy a bigger monitor.)
Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:5, Informative)
It anti-aliases your GNOME widget fonts and there is a separate patch for Mozilla (good up to 0.9.6), which works nicely with Galeon, BTW.
Check it out [sourceforge.net].
Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:1)
Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
The font support is in the right place, it's just that applications need to be changed to use the new, better interface, instead of the old interface that can't do hardware accelerated alpha channel stuff.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't you concentrate on making sure the code works instead of aiming for some arbitrary patch size?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not arbitrary; I believe about 3/4 of the patch consist of unnecessary changes to code that shouldn't be executed in the Xft code path. Unfortunately, the internal abstractions for dealing with fonts are somewhat strained in the current code base, making this assertion testable but not easily verified by visual inspection.
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
to verify it's correct.
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
But as keithp described in another reply - some of the changes are truely redundent and the size isn't being reduced simple because it is clever to do so.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Already possible, sourt of. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Already possible, sourt of. (Score:2)
AA? Goog grief... (Score:1)
Re:AA? Goog grief... (Score:3, Interesting)
of course most cool award goes to:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
(no popups onload from javascript but clicked popups still work)
also good:
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 128);
user_pref("network.huser_pref("mail.quoted_grap
user_pref("mail.display_glyph", true);
user_pref("mail.quoteasblock", true);
user_pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", true);
user_pref("mailnews.display.disable_format_flow
user_pref("mail.display_struct", true);
user_pref("mail.send_struct", false);ttp.max-connections-per-server", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connecti
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connecti
On *nix go to ~/.mozilla/default/something_random/ and edit prefs.js - note, copy it to prefs.js.new, edit it, close mozilla, copy it over prefs.js, restart mozilla, tada (if you edit it while moz is open it'll kill your new prefs.js version because it writes it out on exit or something).
Under Windows go to \Documents and Settings\ to your directory (make sure you have "show all files" in the folder prefs) and you'll find it. Or use that search feature
Re:AA? Goog grief... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AA? Goog grief... (Score:2)
Anyway, see the other reply about users.js or whatever it's called. If you are already using that maybe try adding it to prefs.js and see what happens.
No offense, but ... (Score:1)
Hopefully this can be configured like Windows seems to be, and not AA fonts below a certain size (seems to be 12pt). Below that size, things look clearer to me non-AA.
But that's just IMHO.
Re:No offense, but ... (Score:1)
Re:No offense, but ... (Score:1)
Originally by ChaoWei (won't give email here) in reference to a Chinese font-hinting problem.
Re:No offense, but ... (Score:3, Informative)
match any pixelsize > 8 any pixelsize < 15 edit antialias = false;
This goes into ~/.xftconfig or into /etc/X11/XftConfig.
Italics (Score:2, Interesting)
This is actually a new feature for Mozilla... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're really interested in what's going on with the project, try the latest Build Comments [mozillazine.org]
Yesterday was the last of the frozen trunk builds. And if that's not enough, the Tree Is Opened [mozillazine.org] for 0.9.9 checkins.
And there's now a Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto [mozilla.org] that lays down precisely what Mozilla 1.0 should be (which will come right after 0.9.9).
Of course, it's nice to see a change in SlashDot change its view [slashdot.org] of the project. But, then again, maybe I was right all along [slashdot.org].
Speaking of Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)
Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, Mozilla's never going to be finished, and I don't really care to see it finished either. I'd have to find a new religion.
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:1, Funny)
At this rate it's well on its way to becoming the Emacs of the browser world, and it might even be there now.
With complements like that, who needs insults?
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:3)
But I have to tell you the Mozilla project has done a tremendous job since I first tried it out last year and couldn't get my mail accounts to work properly. It is basically a mature browser, and it's only getting better.
Two caveats:
1. if Konqueror gets tabbed browsing, I may starve to death trying to choose between them.
2. Mozilla folks: PLEASE give us a (preferably one-handed) keyboard shortcut for "next tab". So we can, you know, hold our mice while switching tabs
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:3, Informative)
Try control + page up or control + page down. They added those as shortcuts for switching tabs the milestone after they added tabbed browsing, as I recall. On an extended keyboard, I can easily do those with just my right hand. Of course, I use my right hand for the mouse, so I don't know if it would help with your dilemma.
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:2)
Oh boy, now that's some mozilla-bashing !
Thomas Miconi
Re:Now if they would just add crash-recovery (Score:2)
Re:Too bad Recall doesn't work right now (Score:3, Insightful)
AA (Score:1, Funny)
XFT is... (Score:5, Informative)
Xft [eax.com] is a simple library designed to interface the FreeType rasterizer with the X Rendering Extension.
FreeType [sourceforge.net] is a software font engine that can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, etc. to produce high quality glyphs and characters. The important thing here is that FreeType supports Adobe Type1 and TrueType (that is, Windows) scalable fonts.
the X Rendering Extension [xfree86.org] is a protocol that represents a new way to render (that is, draw) stuff on your screen in X windows.
thus, Xft's incorporation into Mozilla gives us smooth, high quality, Windows compatible fonts while surfing the web on Linux or *BSD
Unfortunately .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype [freetype.org] page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).
Re: Unfortunately .. (Score:4, Informative)
You are right that the k and the W don't look good, but that does not have anything to do with your kernel, but rather the fact that Verdana and Times should not be antialiased at that size. Antialiasing these fonts at that size with hinting enabled is really font murder.
You don't want hinting enabled with antialiasing at that size, because hinting is a way to distort the fonts so that they can be rendered at very low resolution, and antialiasing is essentially a cheasy way to increase resolution. That is why you see the weird "k": the hints don't expect the resolution to be this high.
Here [daimi.au.dk] is a piece of an actual screenshot, showing Verdana mostly un-antialiased, and antialiased in the preview box in the fontselector.
As others pointed out, to match Windows in quality you will need high quality fonts. Of couse, the MS/Monotype fonts (Ariel, Verdana, Trebuchet, etc) are well done and especially well-hinted (if you don't antialias them at sizes where they shouldn't be), but actually the Luxi fonts that are shipping with XFree86 4.2 are not bad - their hints just need some work.
For fun, I hinted Luxi Sans (with the Gimp) at a few sizes. This [daimi.au.dk] is not a real screenshot, but it does show how it could look with better hints. (Note that the bold antialiased Luxi Serif is not hinted at all - a bit of careful hinting would probably improve it somewhat).
> anti-aliasing algorithms itself could
> probably be much improved, although the
> Freetype page points out that Apple patents
This is nonsens. The Apple patent covers the interpreter for the hints in TrueType fonts. Most distributions turn the interpreter on, regardless of the patent, and in fact the bad rendering of the "k" that you complain about is there precisely because both interpreter and antialiasing were used.
Re: Unfortunately .. (Score:2)
I am not familiar with the patent in question -- good that it doesn't seem to concern anything essential!
Sooo, How do we build this? (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone actually get it built?
Why doesn't X just do the right thing with fonts? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can understand that X fonts originally were simple bitmaps that got rendered directly to the screen. But the X server knows what kind of visual is being rendered to, so I don't see why it can't render in a more sophisticated manner when drawing to a visual with at least 16 bits worth of color depth.
Were the original designers of the font rendering mechanism so braindead as to specify that all fonts forevermore would be bitmaps??? What the hell for???
As for the X font protocol, that's easy: design an upgraded protocol that the X server can also deal with, that's used to transmit font information along with transparency information. Or use a separate channel for the transparency information and keep the bitmap protocol the way it is.
But either way, font rendering belongs in the server, and having the client do it is complete nonsense.
I mean, the GC is an opaque data type, as is the Font, right? So what's to prevent you from having a mask with a depth greater than 1, which is created when you use XSetFont() with a font that has alpha information?
Help! I don't understand!!
inappropriate terms (Score:1)
but . . . you did reply. now i'm confused. (Score:1)
Re:So what you're telling me is... (Score:2, Insightful)
In any case, I'm still waiting for important stuff, like multipe consoles and desktops, good memory management, remote graphical apps, etc. to be standard features on Windows...
Re:So what you're telling me is... (Score:1)
I don't have strong feelings for either OS - although Win2k causes me less hassle than Linux does, on my desktop - but if you're going to make it an enemy, at least know your enemy. That said, don't get me started on Win2k/NT memory management apparently swapping for fun.
Re:So what you're telling me is... (Score:2)
That really funny. In my experience, X has always been faster than WinXX on comparable hardware. This is even true if you add in bloated desktops like KDE or GNOME. OTOH, WinXX doesn't have the inherent flexibility to allow for the seamless use of alternate desktops. (so much for "standards")
Let's not even get into any version of WinXX where the comparison is remotely fair. Add on reasonable robustness and Windows starts to get really slow and bloated.
Linux has always had VM support to equal or rival any version of windows.
Besides, individual fonts are much more important than the underlying "font technology".
Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:4, Insightful)
What I think people should keep in mind is that you are comparing a multi-billon-dollar corporation with access to all kinds of patents and trade secrets to what *volunteers* do in their spare time. Keep in mind access to good fonts are what corporations like Microsoft and Apple *slow down* to keep people on their platforms.
If you want to stick your head out against possible liability so others can *freely* use something be my guest. At least don't criticize when others do.
Re:Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:2)
Other than the basic fonts (courer new, times new roman, maybe arial), i don't use much in the way of fonts in windows or linux, and microsoft provides those fonts to me on both platforms
Re:Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:1)
I must concur. TTF is something that Microsoft did right! Back in the "old" days, one had to purchase Adobe Type Manager in order to have scalable fonts in Windows 3.0. When 3.1 came out, Microsoft not only one-upped Adobe with TrueType integration, but they also innovated at bit. They included on-the-fly downloadable font generation for Laserjet compatible printers.
That was a big deal back in the day. If you could not download fonts to the printer and tried to print a font other than the handful of built-in fonts in the printer, each page had to dump a bitmap! Try a 286 with 1 MB RAM dumping to an Okilaser 400 over the OLD slow parallel port. One word: painful.
It made a huge difference at the time. It was an example of Microsoft's ability to really deliver value. I guess those examples have gotten fewer and fewer over the past decade.
Re:Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, actually Microsoft only agreed to use TrueType when it came out. It was actually developed by Apple. They developed it for Windows and Macintosh in order to combat Adobe's strangle hold on the market. Here's an intresting quote on Microsoft's site on TrueType [microsoft.com]:
You can see a pretty detailed history of TrueType on this web page [demon.co.uk].
Re:Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahah! Here [demon.co.uk] it is. As you can see, there were some initial issues in the way that truetype was developed. Microsoft may provide the fonts free, but the original move to create truetype fonts in general was a point of contention between companies.
The only reason I point this out is that it shows that TrueType and Windows' anti-aliasing were developed to counter various strategic threats to Microsoft. I don't pick on Apple because if you read between the lines and the rest of the history, they were burned by some 'incompatibility' that was created by Microsoft.
Anyway - Microsoft isn't giving this away just because, and the original push for TrueType/Anti-aliasing was a major money sink for two companies. (Also, IP issues and development time made it unlinkely to end up in early Xfree, for instance - leading to the problems we've seen on free Unices.)
On the other hand, two implementations of bluetooth drivers for linux were available before even one for Windows. Should we then accuse Microsoft of being slackers when it comes to technology adoption? Turnabout is fair play.
Re:that you dont know what your talking about... (Score:1)
Re:that you dont know what your talking about... (Score:2, Informative)
Quazion.
Ps. sorry but i am a bad mood and yes i never played with the framebuffer before, i really love X
Re:cool symbol (Score:1)
Personally I find it amusing that Slashdot has the icon at all, given that the overwhelming vibe here is anti-MS-influence.