Anti-Aliased Fonts For GNOME 331
McVeigh revels in this posting at Gnotices site which reads: "GDKFXT transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your application.'" He adds "I'm running it now -- it it looks great!!"
I'm not impressed (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be a stick in the mud, but I didn't notice much, if any, improvement when trying it. Of course I'm already operating at reasonably high resolution to start with, so there's going to be somewhat less room for improvement through anti-aliasing, but it's certainly not dramatic. The other disadvantage is that it's only for the one theme, so you can't take advantage if you want to keep using your existing theme. And, as they mention but don't emphasize, it's only for widgets not for all fonts, so the value was rather limited to start with.
Re: What is anti-aliasing? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically anti-aliasing (in this case) means the use of grayscale to make better looking text (or graphics).
By using gray pixels around the edge of text, the "jaggyness" of text can be made to appear to be less.
For an illustration look at the top of Apple's home page, http://www.apple.com [apple.com].
The "text" "Welcome to Apple" at the top is not really text - it is part of a graphic that uses color and grayscale. The characters appear smoother than regular Mac or PC text. Note where it says "What's Hot". It looks much smoother than the regular html text in the headline below it, even though it is about the same size. Note also that anti-aliasing can make text look fuzzy or out of focus.
It is kinda like using interpolation to smooth out a graph.
The higher DPI (dots per inch), the more possible it would be to use this to make better looking text. However, on some systems, this would require new fonts and a complete rewrite of the "engine" that controls writing to the screen. GTK is low-level enough that something like this is able to make all your GTK text anti-aliased.
Anti-aliasing will really show it's merrits in the Web browswer (such as Mozilla that supports anti-aliasing on some platforms) and in graphics, and even some small games.
Only for widgets? (Score:2, Informative)
But it only seems to anti-alias the text on buttons and in menus, not in text input or output panes!? So basically, it anti-aliases the parts of your applications that you look at least.
Not quite what I was hoping for...
Re: What is anti-aliasing? (Score:4, Informative)
Not in OmniWeb in OS X it doesn't; everything is beautifully anti-aliased. Which brings up an interesting point: not all anti-aliasing is created equal. This is very noticeable in OS X, which (for legacy reasons) actually has two different algorithms for it. Loading up the same page in IE (which uses QuickDraw) and OmniWeb (which uses CoreGraphics) makes the differences obvious. So, how good is the GTK anti-aliasing? Anyone got a screenshot?
Re:I'm not impressed (Score:3, Informative)
Well spoken... (Score:5, Informative)
And here is what your
Try it! Your desktop will look much better, and it won't hurt your eyes anymore. Of course you can tweak the point sizes a little.
Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:4, Informative)
But I guess the point would be that there are more fonts out there beyond MS-Verdana and Times New Roman (but I admit to using these heavily), and Sun for one has provided fonts of very high quality with their StarOffice distribution. I won't speculate on the license of said fonts, however.
Stop-gap measure (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't seen it pointed out yet, but GDK/GTK 1.3 have had AA enabled for a while now, so this is very much an interim thing while we wait for the big gnome 2.0 release.
I've tried it out a bit and generally liked it. There are some problems with font sizes in certain applications, where the font is now larger than the widget, but then again this may be due to the changed font preferences required. It takes a bit of fudging the configurations in Debian, and make sure you have a symlink /etc/X11/XF86Config to your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 if you're running XF4.0, or the config script dies.
Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:2, Informative)
On your moinitor, maybe, AA fonts look blurry. On any monitor with a deccently high resolution, = <
And I will do some generalization myself: the better the fonts look in many applications, such as word processors like OpenOffice which now automatically uses AA if available, and document layout programs like Quark Xpress, the more confident and comfortable most people feel about using those applications. The resemblance to printed output removes the need to imagine the look of the final document while working on it. Now that AA has been standard for so long on those platforms where such applications are most used, few of the typesetters, office workers, and none of the designers would ever consider a platform without this ability as minimally acceptable.
AA is most definitely *a* solution for Linux on the desktop. In fact it is an essential solution without any substitute. It is not the only display related feature that has needed improvement on the Linux desktop. But at last we are putting lack of AA behind us.
Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway. But it is completely mistaking the nature of the problem to say that "hinting is important and Anti-aliasing is not at all important, and worse, it is a bad thing".
Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:5, Informative)
No, actually YOU are guilty of doing exactly that. The original poster was 100% correct.
Antialiasing does not solve the problem of displaying fonts at small sizes. Only hinting does this.
Antialiasing can HELP, and is easier, and perhaps for you it is an acceptable solution, but it is equally capable of making it even HARDER to read small type because of the inability for the antialiasing to take into consideration the INTENT of the type designer (which of course is the entire purpose of hinting).
It also depends greatly on the typeface you're using -- perhaps a simple face like Helvetica will appear to display just fine at 8 pts anti-aliased, but using an unhinted script face at that size will be a blur.
AA is most definitely *a* solution for Linux on the desktop. In fact it is an essential solution without any substitute. It is not the only display related feature that has needed improvement on the Linux desktop. But at last we are putting lack of AA behind us.
I agree completely -- at this point it isn't possible for a consumer OS to look "professional" without antialiasing ability, since the Mac and Windows have had it for several years now and people have gotten used to the quality of type on those platforms.
Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway.
Truetype is in every way a superior type technology to Postscript Type 1 (which should be no surprise as it is a decade younger). Miscorost's core collection of TrueType fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, etc) are quite possibly the most well-built fonts in existence.
The only reason we hold Type 1 & Type 3 fonts in such high regard is because such a vast library of high-quality fonts are already in existence that take full advantage of the limited hinting available in PS. Most TT fonts, though, have no manual hinting at all, so they look like crap compared to the PS versions.
Now that OpenType is catching on, we're starting to see really beautiful fonts taking advantage of the extra abilities TT always had but no one took advantage of (but MS).
But it is completely mistaking the nature of the problem to say that "hinting is important and Anti-aliasing is not at all important, and worse, it is a bad thing".
Well, full-time brute-force antialiasing CAN be a bad thing, compared to actually building the font right. It's a great boon for larger type sizes but not the solution for small type at all, and can very much hurt legibility. Both are necessary, and they solve different problems.
Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Xft has the little-known capability of doing subpixel sampling on LCD screens (which is what ClearType is).
To enable it you just have to set the X resource "Xft.rgba: rgb" though depending on the orientation of your LCD panel you may have to use "bgr" or "vrgb" or "vbgr" in place of "rgb".
Alternatively I think you can put
match edit rgba=bgr; (or rgb, or whatever)
in /etc/X11/Xftconfig
Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat... (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft Cleartype is the umbrella term for several technologies such as subpixel anti-aliasing (not invented by MS), understanding how to best use wavelengths to display a clear image to the eye (not invented by MS), some monitor/lcd callibration, and several inconsequential abstraction layers/libraries to allow people to use these technologies easier. Eg, display a jpeg regularly, or via the Cleartype way that moves specific wavelengths so the eye can focus more clearly and get a crisper image.
Microsoft aren't stupid. They're doing what they've always done. They don't invent, but they market very well. That's smart of them.
Try ROX-Filer (Score:3, Informative)
http://rox.sourceforge.net/rox_filer.php3
Here are a couple of pictures of ROX running on my desktop:
Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat... (Score:3, Informative)
It's good technology, but it's a very, very simple idea and a straightforward extension of basic antialiasing; it's only the branding exercise that makes you think Microsoft spent any time or money on it. There's also a reason I suspect that it's buried in XFree86 and not trumpeted around much: Microsoft has it patented. The patent is completely spurious, of course, as subpixel sampling has been around since the Apple II era at least (NYTimes had a good article about just this when the patent was granted), but one would presume the Xfree folks don't want to go to court over it.
Also, as another poster pointed out, there's several odds and ends that go under the rubric ClearType, (though the main one having to do with fonts on LCD screens, which was the original topic of this thread, is subpixel sampling). And there's also several other reasons fonts look better in Windows than Linux. In particular, the fonts themselves are much, much better, and the font rendering engine is better as well. But yes, basically the same infrastructure *is* buried in XFree86, it's just not tweaked as nicely yet.
Re:Yeah, I guess so (Score:3, Informative)
You might check into Display Ghostscript (uh, dunno if it can handle Display PDF stuff...yet...
Re:all your font processing is belongs to X! (Score:1, Informative)
They most definitely did NOT have to write their own font engines.
Re:It's already been done! (Score:1, Informative)
The problem was the $200/machine licence fee that Adobe was demanding for DPS. That sunk NeXT as a general purpose OS, and forced Apple to do extensive re-engineering of their display server. DEC and so on (and later free unixes) went with X because there wasn't some big cut to pay to a 3rd party.
Re:all your font processing is belongs to X! (Score:1, Informative)
KDE and Gnome writing their own antialiasing font engine (server/library/whatever)?
No, they ain't.
FreeType have written a new rendering engine. Keith Packard (of XFree86) has designed an extension for efficient client-side text rendering (known as RENDER), and a client-side library to use the extension with FreeType-generated glyphs (Xft). KDE has been adapted to use Xft.