Re: [ft] Tweaking/Improving FreeType Antialiasing

[Roman Shaposhnik]

On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 23:54 -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> I've never been terribly happy with the antialiasing under various  
> Linux distributions. I'm not sure if this is a personal preference  
> issue or what, but suffice to say, it has been my largest complaint  
> about using Linux on the desktop - the fonts look like utter crap to  
> me. I can adapt to different interfaces - there are pluses and  
> minuses to every way of doing something - but the anti-aliasing under  
> Linux has always been kind of like going from Lindt chocolate to  
> Hershey's chocolate, at least to me.

  Same here. In fact just a couple of months ago I posted to this
very list a similar cry for help and since then got a couple
of helpful hints, but unfortunately haven't seen anybody really
interested in fixing the situation. Given that I'm software
engineer myself and I'm not a stranger to DSP (working on ffmpeg
in my spare time) I'd be more than happy to collaborate on this
project with somebody who is fluent in font rendering technology
or could at least give guidance when I'm stuck. Of course,
if you take into account that I'm already kind of stuck I might
need some guidance right away ;-)
 
> Let me show you a screenshot from FC5 with subpixel anti-aliasing,  
> using the MS Verdana font and FreeType 2.1.10 with bytecode on:
> http://zinkconsulting.com/fc5-bytecode.png

  I've got quite a few screenshots of my own which demonstrate
my *personal* dissatisfaction with font rendering on Linux. The 
problem, once again is that I see the difference but I can not
quite get my head around where to start fixing it. 

  Now, Werner LEMBERG on this list has suggested that FreeType
is off the hook here and we should really look into postprocessing
filtering (sort of like what ClearType does). So it seems that
Xft can benefit from a kind of plug-in infrastructure where we
would be able to insert PP filters of various kinds. Sort of
like what they did here:
  http://turnerdavid.neuf.fr/freetype/patches/font-patches.html
but in a more configurable way.
 
  Hm. I wonder, whether we should move this discussion to Xft
mailing list...

> 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?

  I would very much like to get answers to these questions myself.
If you don't mind -- lets keep each other posted on our findings.
 
> Any thoughts would be much appreciated...

  And *PLEASE* lets continue this conversation.

Thanks,
Roman.