[avrdude-dev] Re: About avrdude-gui

[Bernhard Walle]

Hello,

* Joerg Wunsch [29.10.2005 20:35]:
> About anti-aliased fonts in menues, it's really a matter of an
> opinion.  I absolutely hate them, I want clear, sharp fonts in menues
> (and I know of a number of other people who think the same).  For
> gtk2, it's been my first action to turn off anti-aliasing (btw., how
> does one do that for Qt?).  Font anti-aliasing makes sense for
> scalable text documents but not for a GUI.  So this might even be a
> point for fltk. ;-)

Well, on a modern Linux system, it's no problem to disable anti-aliasing
for small fonts system wide.

Simly add a ~/.fonts.conf with

<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
 <!-- ~/.fonts.conf file to configure user font preferences -->
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
        <test qual="any" name="size" compare="more">
                 <double>9</double>
         </test>
         <test qual="any" name="size" compare="less">
                 <double>14</double>
         </test>
         <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
                 <bool>false</bool>
         </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Xfce and KDE have a GUI for this, GNOME uses X-Ressources but that has
the same effect (but overrides ~/.fonts.conf, so be careful).

I don't like anti-aliasing, too for small fonts, but I want nice-looking
fonts. fltk has a font (Helvetica) hard-coded, with a non-changable
size. That's it. AFAIK there's even no X-Ressouce to change (for Tcl/Tk,
for example, there's one). It's non anti-aliasing, fltk uses the old
font system (X11 core fonts) which is simply outdated.

Qt and GTK allow to dynamically change their fonts depending on the
configuration (~/.gtkrc, ~/.gtkrc-2.0, ~/.qt/qtrc), so gtk1 is still
better from font perspective than fltk because the GUI font is changable.

>> Qt 4 is GPL for Windows, too, runs with MacOS, is widely spread on
>> Linux, comes with a good interface builder ...
> 
> For Qt, see above, where's the knob to turn off anti-aliasing?

Well, it has nothing to do with Qt, it's a system wide setting. You can
change the font with qtconfig, though (e.g. to "Adobe Helvetica" which
is a bitmap font that can't be anti-aliased). You also can disable Xft
with this tool (which uses the old core fonts). But you shouldn't need
to, adjusting ~/.fonts.conf should really work.

I know you use FreeBSD and not Linux, but I think it should work, too,
here, if you use a recent version.

> By now, Qt has never really been considered due to their licensing
> policy.  It's news to me they went GPL now even for Win32.

It was introduced with Qt 4.0.0. Qt 3 is GPL on MacOS X and X11 and
there's http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/. Of course, they have a dual
license to sell their Qt.



Regards,
  Bernhard