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!!"
Fonts: main Linux hindrance (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, until recently, no matter how well I got X running, it still looked like crap. It's looking better now that I've got KDE working with ttfs and anti-aliasing, but it's a LONG way from being user friendly.
My 2 cents.
Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why Microsoft's fonts look so good is because they are hinted and hand-tuned by humans. This is a painstakingly long process but it produces the best looking fonts. Linux is still lacking a copyright-free font set which looks good. Lots of people run the TT font server and use MS fonts because they are simply top-notch. Hinted fonts are essential when it comes to displaying fonts on the computer screen since reproducing quality and readable outlines on a low frequency, discrete grid is not easy.
Linux community needs to produce a quality set of serif and non-serif hinted fonts. Only then will Linux desktop look as good as MS Windows one.
AA is a step in the right direction but it is not a solution.
If you want to learn more about hinting, my I suggest this link: http://microsoft.com/typography/hinting/hinting.h
Yeah, I guess so (Score:2, Insightful)
Is anyone actually proud of this ugly hack? Call me crazy, but antialising should be supported at the font rendering level, not at the application (or app toolkit) level.
Can someone *please* come up with a spec for overhauling font management in X? Overhauling X in general? Just steal display PDF from Apple/Adobe?
Something??? This is unbelievably crude, and the OSS community should be embarrased.
Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:2, Insightful)
To make Free fonts one needs Free tools to make them, unless you can pay for a commercial font type editor.
There's some future in PfaEdit [sourceforge.net] which is somewhat Free though...
Please fix something useful (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, fix the awkward text-selection mechanism in gnome-terminal. It's always half a character off compared to the "industry standard" way this should work. Go look at any Windows or Mac application and copy it's behavior.
Or, implement any of the changes suggested in Sun's recent Gnome usability study. Each of those things are far more important than antialiased fonts.
I appreciate the wonderful work that went into adding the antialiased fonts, but in the future, please concentrate more on fixing the crufty broken parts of Gnome rather than adding flashy new features. Thank you.
Drew Olbrich
This IS a big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux on the desktop is missing, in this order:
1. File Conversion
2. OLE - "cut and paste"
3. Apps ("Office")
4. Proper font support
5. Integration of user interface
6. Speed/efficiency.
7. Platform standards
Now notice, I am not the bad guys.. My home LAN has 7 Linux machines and one Win box. I desperately want to switch my company to OSS as fast as I can. I am hitting the above roadblocks - for a while. I'm pretty confident withing a few years we can overcome all this.
For now, though, IE on Windows looks a whole lot better than Konqueror/Netscape/Mozilla on KDE or Gnome, largely due to fonts. That's what my colleague the CFO notices - this is therefore a major announcement.
Michael
Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat... (Score:2, Insightful)
'sides, how many companies work on the windoze display technology? Now how many work on X? Check out www.x.org sometime. XFree doesn't do everything - most of the code's already there for X (I run a standard X11R6.5 distro on my server, since it has no monitor and I only use X on it for remote display) so they can afford to work on the minor points such as this. And considering that Sun, SGI, IBM, and HP are all riding on X, I'm sure this kind of thing is being helped.
Re:Yeah, I guess so (Score:4, Insightful)
I reluctantly have to agree. Linux is great for a number of different tasks, but anything related to graphic design and desktop publishing is so much better served by Windows and MacOS applications that anyone suggesting Linux for these tasks ought to be laughed out of the room for being the clueless nutball that they are. It is endlessly frustrating to me that I have to keep Windows around to have a full-featured word processor and page layout software, but that's just how it is right now.
I think most Linux users recognize this as an unfortunate fact of life, and it's a natural consequence of the dominant interests of the average Linux user (myself included). Unfortunately, there is a small faction consisting of people who have never used word processors or layout software extensively who think that WordPad clones like AbiWord are "good enough", and they probably are for those users. Likewise with the people who can seriously suggest that the GIMP is a workable replacement for Photoshop, which is a laughable notion for anything except web graphics. When newbies come to Linux, ask where the serious publishing apps are, and get pointed to the GIMP and StarOffice, you can hardly blame them for sticking with commercial apps.
A huge step in the right direction would be the sort of droolproof, unified handling of fonts one sees in Windows and MacOS, especially if TrueType and Type1 fonts were managed through the same interface. On-screen antialiasing at the X level is another must. That we should still be lacking for this sort of fundamental GUI feature in 2001 is a clear sign that someone -- I wish I knew who -- still doesn't get the distinction between programmer/users and application users.
Your right... but (Score:2, Insightful)
Likewise with the people who can seriously suggest that the GIMP is a workable replacement for Photoshop, which is a laughable notion for anything except web graphics.
Well not really laughable, but definitly not a viable replacement for some commercial use, I have to agree. The thing that gets to me about your post is that you just don't seem to realize these are small size development teams that produce these applications for linux. There are just a handfull of KOffice developers while in a commercial setting there would be whole developments departments and teams dedicated eight hours a day to just one application of an office package. Comparing one against the other us as unfair as comparing a Ferrari fundedFormula One car to the '67 Camaro with the rebuilt 427 your neigbor just dropped in. That said the very fact that some linux applications are actually competitive to commercial appz is awe inspiring, to say the least.
The other thing that gets me about your post is that it's always the easiest to make wish-list or spot "the right direction". I'm sorry but unless your contrubiting, keep those thoughts to yourself or post them where developers can view them, /. already gets way too much of that and most developers don't read /. (if you dont beleive me look and the lack of posts in the developers only articles).
end rand...
Commercial solutions are on thier way. Hancom [hancom.com] is releasing what is seamingly (pre-emptive-screen-shot-only-assumption) a robust office package for linux, windows, mac os X. If you're looking for a microsoft alternative you may want to give them a shot.
Re:Xrender (Score:1, Insightful)
That pretty much sums up the hackery that is the X Window System.
Er... that pretty much sums up the state of the rendering in X11.
But there's much more to X11 than just rendering. X11 is a system designed from the ground up to be efficient across the network (minimised roundtrips). It is a system with powerful event-dispatch facilities. And so on, and so on.
I don't think it would be fair to reduce X11 to just its rendering component.