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Xft Support For Mozilla
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jan 24, 2002 03:36 PM
from the one-order-of-augmented-lizard dept.
from the one-order-of-augmented-lizard dept.
keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at
http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.
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Nice link... (Score:4, Funny)
And am I the only one that thought "Wow, Blizzard stopped coding for WarCraft 3 to help Mozilla out?!?"
LCD what? (Score:2, Interesting)
why is this patch HUGE compared to the older one that often gets supplied with the libgdkxft.so that you preload?
Re:LCD what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla is trying to move away from using gdk for its font rendering to make it more portable and less reliant on gdk. Also it should be more flexiable and faster.
I gues the difference in size comes from the fact that it takes more code to use Xft directly then to use libgdkxft. (this is kinda obvious, since the Xft using code is then in libgdkxft).
Bottom line though, the libgdkxft patch didnt have a chance to get included in main stream mozilla, where as this ones probably does.
VERY exciting (Score:5, Informative)
As I'm sure most of you know, most monitors use round pixels, whereas most LCDs use square or the more typical rectangular pixels. So what this means from a GUI standpoint: You need to optimize for the output device. The end result in the screenshot looks GREAT.
Good work guys!
Re:VERY exciting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VERY exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, edit your
See, this is what I love and hate about Linux. The good news is someone hacked this up and someone else documented it and now Konqueror looks *sweet* on my TiBook.
The bad news is -- how the hell was I supposed to know to do this? I mean, besides reading every comment on Slashdot until someone posted a link. (Thank you, by the way, for two excellent links.)
Re:VERY exciting (Score:4, Informative)
searching in groups.google.com has become a "reflex" for me, and it pays !!
Oh dear (Score:4, Insightful)
Luckily I never load Render & I never intend to - after about 5 minutes of looking at KDE with it enabled I had a bad headache. That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the eyes.
I remember when the old archimedes did the same thing... it kinda worked there because they were crappy monitors anyway. With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement.
Depends (Score:5, Informative)
make reading less stressful for the eyes.
Look at text in newer versions of MacOS, BeOS
or Windows XP. Especially at LCD screens the
quality is absolutely convincing.
BUT you need not only a good font renderer, but
also fonts that are hinted correctly.
Re:Oh dear (Score:5, Informative)
Put this into /etc/X11/Xftconfig:
match
any size > 8
any size < 15
edit
antialias = false;
what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts? (Score:1)
Damn..... (Score:1, Interesting)
But it looks like I'll have to upgrade now - and redo all of that font junk, I hope it is a little easier this time around than the last - I can remember spening at least a couple of hours getting it to work last time......
Derek
Wait for stability (Score:3, Insightful)
This new patch is great, but you shouldn't update yet. Wait until it's merged into the official release. Unless, of course, you like to try out new things, in which case go get the update.
Anyway, I look forward to getting the final version of this. (Until then, I'll just have to buy a bigger monitor.)
Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:5, Informative)
It anti-aliases your GNOME widget fonts and there is a separate patch for Mozilla (good up to 0.9.6), which works nicely with Galeon, BTW.
Check it out [sourceforge.net].
Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
The font support is in the right place, it's just that applications need to be changed to use the new, better interface, instead of the old interface that can't do hardware accelerated alpha channel stuff.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't you concentrate on making sure the code works instead of aiming for some arbitrary patch size?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not arbitrary; I believe about 3/4 of the patch consist of unnecessary changes to code that shouldn't be executed in the Xft code path. Unfortunately, the internal abstractions for dealing with fonts are somewhat strained in the current code base, making this assertion testable but not easily verified by visual inspection.
Already possible, sourt of. (Score:4, Interesting)
AA? Goog grief... (Score:1)
No offense, but ... (Score:1)
Hopefully this can be configured like Windows seems to be, and not AA fonts below a certain size (seems to be 12pt). Below that size, things look clearer to me non-AA.
But that's just IMHO.
Italics (Score:2, Interesting)
This is actually a new feature for Mozilla... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're really interested in what's going on with the project, try the latest Build Comments [mozillazine.org]
Yesterday was the last of the frozen trunk builds. And if that's not enough, the Tree Is Opened [mozillazine.org] for 0.9.9 checkins.
And there's now a Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto [mozilla.org] that lays down precisely what Mozilla 1.0 should be (which will come right after 0.9.9).
Of course, it's nice to see a change in SlashDot change its view [slashdot.org] of the project. But, then again, maybe I was right all along [slashdot.org].
Speaking of Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)
Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, Mozilla's never going to be finished, and I don't really care to see it finished either. I'd have to find a new religion.
Re:Mozilla just keeps getting cooler. (Score:5, Funny)
AA (Score:1, Funny)
XFT is... (Score:5, Informative)
Xft [eax.com] is a simple library designed to interface the FreeType rasterizer with the X Rendering Extension.
FreeType [sourceforge.net] is a software font engine that can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, etc. to produce high quality glyphs and characters. The important thing here is that FreeType supports Adobe Type1 and TrueType (that is, Windows) scalable fonts.
the X Rendering Extension [xfree86.org] is a protocol that represents a new way to render (that is, draw) stuff on your screen in X windows.
thus, Xft's incorporation into Mozilla gives us smooth, high quality, Windows compatible fonts while surfing the web on Linux or *BSD
Unfortunately .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype [freetype.org] page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).
Re: Unfortunately .. (Score:4, Informative)
You are right that the k and the W don't look good, but that does not have anything to do with your kernel, but rather the fact that Verdana and Times should not be antialiased at that size. Antialiasing these fonts at that size with hinting enabled is really font murder.
You don't want hinting enabled with antialiasing at that size, because hinting is a way to distort the fonts so that they can be rendered at very low resolution, and antialiasing is essentially a cheasy way to increase resolution. That is why you see the weird "k": the hints don't expect the resolution to be this high.
Here [daimi.au.dk] is a piece of an actual screenshot, showing Verdana mostly un-antialiased, and antialiased in the preview box in the fontselector.
As others pointed out, to match Windows in quality you will need high quality fonts. Of couse, the MS/Monotype fonts (Ariel, Verdana, Trebuchet, etc) are well done and especially well-hinted (if you don't antialias them at sizes where they shouldn't be), but actually the Luxi fonts that are shipping with XFree86 4.2 are not bad - their hints just need some work.
For fun, I hinted Luxi Sans (with the Gimp) at a few sizes. This [daimi.au.dk] is not a real screenshot, but it does show how it could look with better hints. (Note that the bold antialiased Luxi Serif is not hinted at all - a bit of careful hinting would probably improve it somewhat).
> anti-aliasing algorithms itself could
> probably be much improved, although the
> Freetype page points out that Apple patents
This is nonsens. The Apple patent covers the interpreter for the hints in TrueType fonts. Most distributions turn the interpreter on, regardless of the patent, and in fact the bad rendering of the "k" that you complain about is there precisely because both interpreter and antialiasing were used.
Sooo, How do we build this? (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone actually get it built?
Blizzard did this? (Score:1)
:P
NanoX port of Mozilla (Score:1)
nanox port of Mozilla (Done by Tuxia Labs Aust)
that shows antialias font support. The original
announcement on the nanox mailing list was dated
6th Dec 2001.
See http://nxzilla.tuxia.org/antialias.png
Finally! (Score:1)
The bullets (right)in the screenshots sucks... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why doesn't X just do the right thing with fonts? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can understand that X fonts originally were simple bitmaps that got rendered directly to the screen. But the X server knows what kind of visual is being rendered to, so I don't see why it can't render in a more sophisticated manner when drawing to a visual with at least 16 bits worth of color depth.
Were the original designers of the font rendering mechanism so braindead as to specify that all fonts forevermore would be bitmaps??? What the hell for???
As for the X font protocol, that's easy: design an upgraded protocol that the X server can also deal with, that's used to transmit font information along with transparency information. Or use a separate channel for the transparency information and keep the bitmap protocol the way it is.
But either way, font rendering belongs in the server, and having the client do it is complete nonsense.
I mean, the GC is an opaque data type, as is the Font, right? So what's to prevent you from having a mask with a depth greater than 1, which is created when you use XSetFont() with a font that has alpha information?
Help! I don't understand!!
And for XFree 3.3.6? Will this be merged on Moz? (Score:1)
inappropriate terms (Score:1)
Re:So what you're telling me is... (Score:2, Insightful)
In any case, I'm still waiting for important stuff, like multipe consoles and desktops, good memory management, remote graphical apps, etc. to be standard features on Windows...
Re:that you dont know what your talking about... (Score:1)
Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:4, Insightful)
What I think people should keep in mind is that you are comparing a multi-billon-dollar corporation with access to all kinds of patents and trade secrets to what *volunteers* do in their spare time. Keep in mind access to good fonts are what corporations like Microsoft and Apple *slow down* to keep people on their platforms.
If you want to stick your head out against possible liability so others can *freely* use something be my guest. At least don't criticize when others do.
Re:Lets get some facts straight first. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, actually Microsoft only agreed to use TrueType when it came out. It was actually developed by Apple. They developed it for Windows and Macintosh in order to combat Adobe's strangle hold on the market. Here's an intresting quote on Microsoft's site on TrueType [microsoft.com]:
You can see a pretty detailed history of TrueType on this web page [demon.co.uk].
Re:cool symbol (Score:1)
Personally I find it amusing that Slashdot has the icon at all, given that the overwhelming vibe here is anti-MS-influence.
Re:Good work... (Score:1)
I have no idea what the hell they're talking about, why it means anything to anybody or why they are pimping some couple hours worth of work.
Once again, brilliant reporting!
inky