Re: [ft] libXft patch: use FreeType built-in color filtering

[David Turner]

Just to indicate that I replaced the patch file with a new one that
plays nicely with the real libXft-2.1.7 release. It seems the previous
one was malformed, for some reason.

The address hasn't changed though:

  http://david.freetype.org/lcd/libXft-2.1.7-lcd-filter-1.patch

Regards,

- David

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 03:22:35 +0200, "David Turner" <address@hidden> said:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I've written a patch to libXft-2.1.7 that modifies the library to use the
> new
> built-in FreeType LCD color filtering features. It is currently available
> at:
> 
>   http://david.freetype.org/lcd/libXft-2.1.7-lcd-filter-1.patch
> 
> Note that:
> 
> - IMPORTANT: the patched library will *not* compile if you haven't
> FreeType
>              CVS, 2.2.2 or better previously installed !!
> 
>   since I didn't want to lose my time with configure.ac and all, this
>   is detected by a #error statement at compile time, not configuration
>   time. Any volunteer to move the check to the config script ?
> 
> - the patched library doesn't care if FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING
>   was defined in your FreeType build. If the feature is disabled, it will
>   simply be tricked into displaying normal anti-aliased glyphs (even if
>   the slower LCD-decimated glyph composition function will be used with
>   XRender).
> 
>   it might be better, performance wise, to test if the feature is
>   disabled
>   initially, and if so, to only use the faster gray-level composition
>   functions. However, I'll leave this to another patch.
> 
> - the patch only uses FT_LCD_FILTER_DEFAULT at the moment. It shall be
>   fairly trivial to update the code to use different filters based on
>   user choices (the equivalent of "light" and "strong" hinting on
>   MacOSX),
>   but this needs updates to the fontconfig stuff used to store and
>   process
>   this kind of preferences beforehand, plus make it available to
>   preferences dialog like gnome-font-properties
> 
> 
> As usual, please report any problem. The patch was tested in all modes
> (mono, gray, RGB, BGR, VRGB, VBGR) but I admit I didn't test all
> funky cases (e.g. transformed/rotated text)
> 
> Installing this patch after 2.2.2 (a.k.a. current CVS at the moment),
> should
> affect all KDE applications, and some others that use libXft to render
> text
> (e.g. FireFox, Thunderbird). GTK/Gnome applications are likely not to be
> affected, since this will require a patch to Cairo, which I'll try to
> provide later.
> 
> There will probably be several Cairo patches, because the font rendering
> internals have changed quite a bit between the various recent releases of
> the library (e.g. 1.0.4, 1.1.6, 1.2.0)
> 
> Regards, and enjoy !! 
> - David Turner
> - The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)
> 
> 
> 
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- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)