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!!"
Re:This is just what we need (Score:3, Interesting)
The weird thing is that under Win or NT, I have little problems with using their filemanager, and under MacOS, I'd feel lost without having directory windows everywhere. When I tried a program that gave me the same interface on Linux, I lost all patience within five minutes.
I think it's something about how you think about your system. I see Linux differently than I see MacOS (or Windows...), so my preferred work habits are different too. I saw the same thing happen with a friend who's a long time Mac developer when he started using Linux. After a while, he went more and more to using a shell instead of a filemanager (though he still mixes those uses after almost a year).
/Janne
Re:This is great! (Score:2, Interesting)
AA for medium sized fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
AA can, if overdone make medium sized fonts seem blury and hard to read. In the end, this is not a weakness in the idea of AA but in the implementation. For a good implementation of AA check out BeOS, medium sized fonts are (where) only slightly AA:ed, producing smooth but sharp-looking fonts. I belive this is done by using a single grayscale, and using a bias towards b/w. For very pretty but almost completely unreadable AA-fonts, check out MacOS.
anti-aliasing (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else dislike anti-aliased fonts for this reason. Granted, some fonts just look absolutely horrible if they're not anti-aliased, but good fonts don't need it.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3, Interesting)
For a great implementation of AA fonts, check out QNX's RtP. [qnx.com] The Font Fusion [bitstream.com] powered Photon has the most god-damn gorgeous fonts in the entire universe. Download RtP just to take an eyeful of the fonts!
It's already been done! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat... (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't think that it has anything to do with the number of people working on the technology. How many people invented Google? The Apple? TCP/IP? HTML? In some situations having a large number of developers is a good thing; writing the large number of device drivers for linux, for example. I don't think it is the same in this case, though.
IBM and HP riding in X? That's quite funny.
I've worked a lot with many versions of Windows, Solaris nee SunOS and Linux. Cutting through the individual display technologies, all I can say is that the fonts in XP look way better than anything I have ever seen before. Every colleague who has seen XP running (including many MacOS designers) have literally dropped their jaw. It's the first thing that they mention when they see the desktop.
Wait and see for yourself. I know the majority of
Re:It's already been done! (Score:1, Interesting)
Two points to make about this:
NeWS was somewhat ahead of its time. Back in Ancient History, workstations simply didn't have enough power to do Display PostScript effectively. It seems funny to call X11 "lightweight", but it was better then DPS.
The second point is that Display PDF != Display PostScript. My understanding (and I might be wrong) is that Display PDF fixes a lot of the brain damage that was in DPS.
No, we can't turn back the clock (and NeWS wasn't a panacea by any means), but Apple may have actually done something right for a change by embracing Display PDF. I would really like to see an OSS movement to clone the good parts of what Apple has done (and throw away the stupid parts, of which there are many -- this is Apple we're talking about).
Xrender (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Xrender [eax.com] is an extension to the X protocol implemented in XFree86 that is resposible for the anti-aliasing in Qt/KDE. It supports Porter/Duff operations for image composition (true alpha blending) and elements found in DisplayPDF (paths, transformations, etc...). A good introduction to Xrender ideas and why the current X protocol was "blundered" are here [xfree86.org]. I especially like the part:
That pretty much sums up the hackery that is the X Window System.
Re:Yeah, I guess so (Score:3, Interesting)
At university, LaTeX is the serious publishing app in my department. Different strokes for different folks. CMYK support in GIMP is a huge deal. I don't envy any of the poor souls who are navigating all the patents on that.
But since we're speaking of publishing, a much larger problem than "lousy print support (you *can* do CMYK under Linux, but it's all done through ghostscript or gimp-print using printer-specific drivers, thus 'lousy' and not 'no')" is "no decent drawing program". We've got the photoshop, but not the Illustrator or Painter clone. I know about killustrator (or whatever it's called now), sketch, etc. but they are *much* further behind than GIMP. let's not even start on PageMaker and the rest.
X has supported server side extensions for a very long time. XRender is getting more and more usage daily. Why don't you get a better window manager and a newer copy of X?
Anti-aliasing is cheap in hardware these days, unlike when X was designed. But you have to look at the original philosophy of the design: network transparency. But I also question the philosophy that the display server knows better what to anti-alias than the client. How much overhead will client-specific messages about "do not AA this. do AA that" take up? Compared to VNC, X protocol is a speed daemon. I like it that way.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, just pointing out some things.
-l
Where to start? (Score:2, Interesting)
We start by defining a common format, in XML, and use filters to convert between the old and the new formats for these files until the libraries are written to read/write the new formats from the applications that need them (backwards compatible filters would probably be a GOOD THING for a while, just to keep a version of these files around
The need for this is for simplification of configuration. A simple GUI (ala window's regedit) could be written to configure. I'm not suggesting that we should use a flatfile database like the windows registry. Not in the least. Just that every application should store its data in the same format and use the same configuration editor to tweak the guts and that the configuration should be stored in a common location under
Of course, this could be extended to user configuration for programs as well so that all configuration data ends up in one location under $HOME. This sure would be a nice way to backup one's configuration without jumping through hoops.
Am I reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing working towards doing something like this?
Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting (Score:2, Interesting)
Even Microsoft would call the X11-like license which PfaEdit is released under a Free license.
What more could you want?
Now, about my