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Re: [ft] Tweaking/Improving FreeType Antialiasing


From: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [ft] Tweaking/Improving FreeType Antialiasing
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:34:36 -0700

Roman,

Thank you so much - it seems to be maddening trying to explain the issues to most Linux users. Quite literally, they do not care or see any significant difference. I beg to differ!

Take a look at a little heads up comparison:
http://zinkconsulting.com/aa-comparison.png

I personally prefer something more along the lines of the OS X light subpixel anti-aliasing.

I'm afraid to report that I'm not a programmer, I've had some experience in that arena, but I'm pursuing a different direction in business. I would be happy to help when I can and I'm not incompetent, but I don't have much skill. I can, however, provide a great deal of feedback regarding the quality and aesthetic matters.

I'd be very happy with just a custom browser build - say something KHTML based maybe - that has great font rendering and kerning. It would make Linux so much nicer to use. OpenOffice, Gnome and a PDF viewer would be next up on my list for improved font handling. I don't think it's going to be perfect system-wide, however, if I'm understanding the limitations properly - but maybe there's at least room for improvement?

-Galen

On Aug 27, 2006, at 6:40 AM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:

On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 14:24 +0200, Tor Andersson wrote:
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.

  Thanks for the info, but let me ask you this -- is there somebody
working on Xft to make it possible ? Are they pursuing a different
route ?

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, what kind of software did you use to achieve such a result ? Can
it be leveraged for Xft (at least the filtering part)?

  Also, if you don't mind -- can you elaborate a bit on how did you
do fractional positioning (I mean it doesn't seem to be possible
with FT APIs so you must have done something else here).

  And as always -- any pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Roman.








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