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pjp
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2002 8:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As far as I can tell, following these instructions hasn't helped. I saw this link:
Ivan Zenkov wrote:
Good manual on this subject - Good-looking fonts in X Windows
However, in comparing two images, I think the After image looks more fuzzy
than the Before image.
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2002 8:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's the idea, kanuslupus. Anti-aliasing uses partial pixel shading to reflect the fact that lines and curves don't line up on pixel boundaries, so it's supposed to be not as crisp as the standard on/off mode.
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2002 8:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

delta407 wrote:
That's the idea, kanuslupus. Anti-aliasing uses partial pixel shading to reflect the fact that lines and curves don't line up on pixel boundaries, so it's supposed to be not as crisp as the standard on/off mode.
Oh... I thought it was supposed to improve them ;)
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Naan Yaar
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 13, 2002 9:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, the screenshots are a bit dubious. The fonts used are totally different and I cannot see how you can really do a fair comparison :)

Antialiasing works nicely at larger point sizes. I use it for fonts > 18pts. For smaller sizes, AA makes things fuzzy, at least as implemented in Xft+freetype. If you look at AA'd lower case "k"s, upper case "M", "W", etc., the slanted strokes look awfully thin and bad.

kanuslupus wrote:
delta407 wrote:
That's the idea, kanuslupus. Anti-aliasing uses partial pixel shading to reflect the fact that lines and curves don't line up on pixel boundaries, so it's supposed to be not as crisp as the standard on/off mode.
Oh... I thought it was supposed to improve them ;)
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2002 9:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Naan Yaar wrote:
Antialiasing works nicely at larger point sizes. I use it for fonts > 18pts. For smaller sizes, AA makes things fuzzy, at least as implemented in Xft+freetype. If you look at AA'd lower case "k"s, upper case "M", "W", etc., the slanted strokes look awfully thin and bad.


Something happened to the antialiasing between XFree86-4.2-r9 and XFree86-4.2-r12 to screw up rendering of characters such as lower-case 'k', as you say. For this reason, I'm sticking with r9 until it is fixed. I don't have a comparison screenshot showing r12, but here is what it looks like with r9 (80kB png):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.goldby/misc/konqantialias.png
Very nice, IMO. Note the 'k' of 'Bookmarks'.
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2002 5:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

iangoldby wrote:

Something happened to the antialiasing between XFree86-4.2-r9 and XFree86-4.2-r12 to screw up rendering of characters such as lower-case 'k', as you say. For this reason, I'm sticking with r9 until it is fixed. I don't have a comparison screenshot showing r12, but here is what it looks like with r9 (80kB png):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.goldby/misc/konqantialias.png
Very nice, IMO. Note the 'k' of 'Bookmarks'.


What is with those Hollow looking letters? I dont think "very Nice" would be the words I would use to describe that. I've been using KDE3/Konqueror and I've never seen fonts as ugly as ANY of the screenshots I've seen in this entire thread. all of my fonts look perfect all the time, I've never applied any hacks, patches or had to edit any config files. I'm not sure what revision of X i'm running but I last emerged it about a a week ago.
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Naan Yaar
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2002 8:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks. The screenshot you have looks very good. I really cannot see any bad artefacts (well, maybe the top of lowercase "a"s is a bit fuzzy, but I'm nitpicking :)) May be I should revert to 4.2-r9 too! Looks like you were using verdana too (?) What font size was this?
iangoldby wrote:
...
Something happened to the antialiasing between XFree86-4.2-r9 and XFree86-4.2-r12 to screw up rendering of characters such as lower-case 'k', as you say. For this reason, I'm sticking with r9 until it is fixed. I don't have a comparison screenshot showing r12, but here is what it looks like with r9 (80kB png):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.goldby/misc/konqantialias.png
Very nice, IMO. Note the 'k' of 'Bookmarks'.
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 14, 2002 9:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry, I should have said. The menu font is Verdana 10. I use Verdana 9 for Kicker (not visible in the shot), which happens to be really crisp.

'metalhedd': I don't know what you mean by 'hollow-looking letters'. I can't see anything that I'd describe that way. I think it does go to show though what a subjective thing font-appearance is. I also wonder how much it may be affected by different monitors. In any case, I'd be very grateful if you ('metalhedd') would post a screen shot of your system. Perhaps we could all have something to learn from you.

Ian
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 15, 2002 8:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I stand corrected. It was the horrible PNG support of netscape navigator for windows.

next time I'm at work I'll see if I can get a screenshot of it.. Its horrible.. the screen shot you showed me looks alot like my system.

I have to use netscape to view all the screenshots cuz MSIE Doesn't support 90% of the PNG images out there.
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is mozilla for Windows, you know :D
metalhedd wrote:
I stand corrected. It was the horrible PNG support of netscape navigator for windows.

next time I'm at work I'll see if I can get a screenshot of it.. Its horrible.. the screen shot you showed me looks alot like my system.

I have to use netscape to view all the screenshots cuz MSIE Doesn't support 90% of the PNG images out there.
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 12:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Can't install stuff at work...
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2002 2:02 pm    Post subject: Intriguing ... Reply with quote

I'm glad to see this has generated quite a bit of interest. I must apologise for not having gotten involved in the discussion recently (things have been completely hectic lately on all fronts and I've simply had no time to catch up on things in the forums, nor play with things on my Gentoo box - for some reason I haven't been getting notifications for this topic either).

Needless to say, I look forward to digesting the interesting comments that have been made when I get a nice slot of free time.

BTW, there is a DRI mailing list for the Direct Render Infrastructure which covers Xft and so forth. This is a great list to subscribe to for those interested in the topic, and the subscription page can be found here: http://www.xfree86.org/mailman/listinfo/render.
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 27, 2002 2:43 pm    Post subject: xfree-4.2.0-r12 with and without Xft patch Reply with quote

Folks,

This harks back to a previous comment I made that antialiasing is not as good in xfree-4.2.0-r12 as in xfree-4.2.0-r9. See here for a comparison of xfree-4.2.0-r12 as standard, and with the patch.

It is easy enough to modify the ebuild file to include the patch if you want it. The screen shots will help you decide if it is worth it. The patch was present in r9 - the maintainers just commented it out of the ebuild with r12.

Ian
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 28, 2002 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jtmace wrote:
i installed gentoo.. emerged KDE and Mozilla and other common apps.

Konqueror renders fonts beutifully but Mozilla applies no antialiasing what-so-ever. Is there a way to fix this or does Mozilla just no work with anti-aliasing? Thanks


Mozilla works with antialiasing, but you need to tickle it!
The antialiasing is based on a gdkxft library, which actually replaces the mozilla rendering library.

Gentoo doesn't support gdkxft, it's masked. Because it's not working flawless with just any application. I installed gdkxft and activated it only for mozilla and galeon.

It works Great!
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Naan Yaar
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 1:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mozilla, as installed out of the box in gentoo (mine is mozilla-1.0-r3 - no tweaks), has antialiasing support that works fine. It renders a little bit differently from what happens in konqueror, but it seems OK overall. The unix.js file in the preferences directory seems to set up freetype and antialiasing support by default. I have used xmag to actually verify that antialiasing does happen in moz :)
wilbertnl wrote:

Mozilla works with antialiasing, but you need to tickle it!
The antialiasing is based on a gdkxft library, which actually replaces the mozilla rendering library.

Gentoo doesn't support gdkxft, it's masked. Because it's not working flawless with just any application. I installed gdkxft and activated it only for mozilla and galeon.

It works Great!
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 1:23 am    Post subject: More questions Reply with quote

Naan Yaar wrote:
Mozilla, as installed out of the box in gentoo (mine is mozilla-1.0-r3 - no tweaks), has antialiasing support that works fine. It renders a little bit differently from what happens in konqueror, but it seems OK overall. The unix.js file in the preferences directory seems to set up freetype and antialiasing support by default. I have used xmag to actually verify that antialiasing does happen in moz :)


Hm, maybe I did something wrong, then, but I noticed a big improvement with the gdkxft trick.

Did you set USE="gtk2" before you compiled mozilla-1.0-r3?
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 1:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually I don't use gtk2 and did not compile mozilla with it. Something that may be of interest:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=mozilla+freetype+internal&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=pan.2002.06.26.20.33.32.968347.450%40SPAM_killall.net&rnum=2
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 2:00 am    Post subject: Mozilla compared with xft rendering Reply with quote

Naan Yaar wrote:
Actually I don't use gtk2 and did not compile mozilla with it. Something that may be of interest:


The newsgroup post is clear. Mozilla doesn't render as pretty as straight xft or even gdkxft. They refer to nightly builds in rpm format, I would like to get the patches itself!!
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 2:22 am    Post subject: Re: Mozilla compared with xft rendering Reply with quote

I turn off AA below 18pts anyway. For the sizes I am interested in, mozilla seems to be doing a credible job. At smaller point sizes, freetype itself seems to have problems with rendering diagonal strokes correctly (as in "k", "M", etc.) regardless of whether it is kde or mozilla.

All a matter of taster anyway... whatever works!
wilbertnl wrote:

The newsgroup post is clear. Mozilla doesn't render as pretty as straight xft or even gdkxft. They refer to nightly builds in rpm format, I would like to get the patches itself!!
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 1:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mozilla is quite good even without gtk2/gdkxft ...
you just need to adjust your prefs a bit.
http://mpillard.free.fr/mozilla/mozmail.png for a shot of what it looks like on my desktop (well, used to, I changed it a bit to have aa for the toolbar buttons too :)
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 7:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dioxmat wrote:
mozilla is quite good even without gtk2/gdkxft ...
you just need to adjust your prefs a bit.
http://mpillard.free.fr/mozilla/mozmail.png for a shot of what it looks like on my desktop (well, used to, I changed it a bit to have aa for the toolbar buttons too :)


Can you show us some italic fonts too? Italic fonts are the real proof for anti-aliasing.
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I discovered yesterday a small tweak to the /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref/unix.js file that improved the consistency of character weight. I was previously bothered in some fonts with the strokes of letters like lower-case 'w' looking too heavy or thick.

[img:625861a8d1]http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.goldby/misc/gamma.png[/img:625861a8d1]

The left-hand images are with a gain of 0.0 and the right-hand images are with gain of 1.0. If you don't see any difference on your screen, then you needn't bother with the tweak.

pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0.0");

The default is something like 0.8. Smaller values seem to reduce the weight on strokes away from 45 degrees to be more consistent with the other strokes. It didn't seem to make any difference to the feint 45 degree strokes such as in 'k' - at least it was not any worse.

Again, it's a case of what works best on your monitor and screen resolution. Lower screen resolution/sharper monitors seem to need more antialiasing than higher screen resolution/less sharp monitors, and are less tolerant of misplaced pixels (such as in the middle of the 'S').
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 10:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have followed all the different instructions here and fonts look great everywhere except for Mozilla!!
Fonts > 8 and < 14 are still anti-aliased!
What can I do?
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 11:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

change your mozilla prefs. (check out unix.js ...)
btw, I would suggest that you leave aa enabled for bigs fonts... or it will look really bad :)
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 5:07 pm    Post subject: Tips for Mozilla AA fonts Reply with quote

Today I took a look around in the unix.js file and found something that really works! Somewhere in the file you'll find codes like this:
Code:

// below a certian pixel size outline scaled fonts produce poor results
pref("font.scale.outline.min",      17);

// TrueType
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
// if libfreetype was built without hinting compiled in
// it is best to leave hinting off
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
// below a certian pixel size anti-aliased fonts produce poor results
pref("font.antialias.min",        17);
pref("font.embedded_bitmaps.max", 1000000);
pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.min", 64);
pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0.8");
// sample prefs for TrueType font dirs
pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/usr/share/fonts/truetype");
pref("font.directory.truetype.2", "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF");
pref("font.directory.truetype.3", "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype");

// below a certian pixel size anti-aliased bitmat scaled fonts
// produce poor results
pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.enable", true);
pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.always", false);
pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.min", 17);

Do you see the 3 places where there is the number 17 written?
Anyway, insted of 17 the default was 10 and that's why Mozilla anti-aliased small fonts which I had disabled in Xftconfig but didn't understand why it didn't work in Mozilla.
So now Mozilla renders fonts great, whether small or big fonts!
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