Re: [ft] Tweaking/Improving FreeType Antialiasing

[address@hidden]

Tor,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, and sorry for the double post.  
I accidently sent from the wrong email address, but apparently  
somebody was nice enough to approve it for posting.

If I'm reading your post correctly, you're basically saying that  
getting text that looks the way I want is hopeless. I'm very  
sensitive to font appearance, but I'm not intimately familiar with  
all the terminology. It sounds like Linux has an API limitation? And  
this API limitation is what in turn makes the fonts look so  
miserable? (In my view.)

Regarding turning off hinting, wasn't that the default setting under  
FC5? I'm fairly sure I experimented around with turning on hinting  
(auto/bytecode) because the FC5 default was off. I wasn't happy with  
the FC5 default settings, not by a long shot.

If true, this sucks for me, because frankly, fonts are a big deal to  
me. I have to stare at them nonstop. I would nearly kill to get a  
browser that looks like Safari (or another OS X WebKit-based browser)  
under Linux. Even under OS X, Mozilla-based browsers have horrendous  
kerning - particularly of italic serif fonts. I love the feature set,  
but the kerning turns me off - despite using the system anti-aliasing  
- so I can't stand to use Mozilla more than the bare minimum.

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I think one the largest barriers to using  
Linux on the desktop for me is the maddening font rendering quality.  
Where precisely is the problem coming in? Would it be possible to use  
an alternative desktop or window manager to get around it?

I did look at the examples you showed me. The first example looks  
somewhat better than what I normally see under Linux. The kerning is  
pleasant and the anti-aliasing appears to be strong enough to offer  
an accurate rendering of the text for that point size, although it  
has a distinctly soft/blurry look compared to 10.4's subpixel anti- 
aliasing, much like fonts looked under earlier versions of Mac OS X.  
I would be curious how well those settings work across a wide range  
of fonts.

Any additional thoughts/suggestions?

-Galen

On Aug 27, 2006, at 5:24 AM, Tor Andersson wrote:

> On 8/27/06, address@hidden <address@hidden>  
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > There are flaws, in my view, with the OS X rendering, but it is (to
> > me) an absolute night and day improvement over the stuff in FC5.
> > Similarly, Adobe's CoolType (when properly configured) can look
> > pretty much as good as OS X as well.
> >
> > Is it even possible to get FreeType rendering text that even comes
> > close to the OS X screenshots? If it's not possible with FreeType, is
> > there some library I could drop in place of FreeType to get text that
> > (to me) actually looks really good?
>
> To get OS X like text, you have to disable hinting. (This is a  
> truth with
> some modification. Since OSX 10.3 there is some very subtle hinting
> going on in OSX to align horizontal stems with the pixel grid. In  
> versions
> prior to 10.3 all text was rendered completely unhinted.)
>
> It still won't be perfect, since all Linux toolkits snap metrics to
> pixel integer coordinates which gives somewhat uneven spacing.
> Don't even think about CoolType or ClearType in Linux; the Xft code
> does not do filtering across pixel borders so it's a *lot* worse than
> it could be.
>
> Add this snippet to your fonts.conf:
>
> <match target="font">
> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><const>false</const></edit>
> </match>
>
> It's not FreeType's fault that Linux text looks bad.
> For reference, with FreeType 2 it is possible to get the kind of
> text quality displayed in the screenshots on this web page:
>
> http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/screenshots.html
>
> Here I use FreeType2 to render text unhinted, taking in account
> the fractional position of each glyph within the pixel (ie, the render
> of a character is different depending on whether it starts at pixel
> coordinate 0.0 or 0.2 or 0.7, for example). I also apply a 5-component
> wide LCD coloring filter.
>
> Tor