[HOWTO]New freetype subpixel font rendering for lcd monitors

[IvanMajhen]

For openoffice?

[irasnyd]

I've got an interesting problem. I've got x11-libs/cairo and x11-libs/libXft from the fonts overlay, and I have a custom ebuild to apply the patch from freedesktop #13566 that vonr mentioned above. I've added the "lcdfilter" stuff to my ~/.fonts.conf and it all works great. My fonts look lovely. No problems there.

The problem I have is that text rendering is SLOW. Really slow. I can see the text redrawing line by line in a TreeView widget, for example. I ran some tests using GtkPerf and it is not my imagination. The test that shows the problem for me is the GtkDrawingArea - Text test. It takes ~23 seconds to complete. This is on my desktop, which has a nVidia Ti4800 in it (NV28). I'm using nvidia's proprietary drivers, x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-96.43.01. I wish I could use the newer versions, but this card isn't supported by them.

I also have a laptop set up in exactly the same way, with identical ebuilds and /etc/fonts/* configuration. The text rendering is also excellent. It looks exactly like my desktop. The difference is that the same GtkPerf test takes < 2 seconds, and text rendering is not slow at all. The laptop has a Intel GMA950 / 945GM graphics chip in it, which should be slower than the one in my desktop.

I've heard that slow text rendering can be caused by lack of RENDER acceleration. I'm pretty sure I have the acceleration turned on. This is the output of grep -i render /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[PaulBredbury]

Try e.g.:

[irasnyd]

[m.s.w]

I see that there is cairo-1.5.12.ebuild in boniek's font-overlay, but it doesn't want to upgrade. I have cairo in package.keywords but still it doesn't go. What should I do to have it?
_________________
Mark Twain said it best:
"If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long!"

[OmSai]

Auto patching of the cairo-1.5.12.ebuild fails

I updated the ebuild in the overlay:

[vonr]

[OmSai]

Thank you, vonr!

[vonr]

FYI I've updated the ebuilds in the tarball to re-contain their original keywords (well, not exactly: I've dropped fontconfig to ~arch). These ebuilds come from my own local overlay and I only use them on x86 hardware...

[trumee]

Thanks guys for the new ebuild. Unfortunately, these patches dont seem to make any difference to my system. I have installed the vonr ebuilds on my amd64 system:

[PaulBredbury]

[vonr]

Updated the tarball with an ebuild for cairo-1.5.14.

[Rikz]

What about libXft, should I still use newspr patch? Or it is enough to use patched cairo and fontconfig.

[vonr]

[niick]

Could someone please post an ebuild for openoffice, to enable the nice font rendering. I tried to apply the patch to the 2.4.0 ebuild but it failed

[dman777]

OmSai,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write that tutorial! It is perfect. Thank you again!



I have a question, copied and pasted the following into my /etc/fonts/local.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Enable freetype's new subpixel filter. Currently, only a cairo
version containing the patches from freedesktop #10301 respects this
setting. Fontconfig needs to be patched using the patches from freedesktop
#13566 for this to work; 2.6 will contain this functionality by default. -->
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
<const>lcddefault</const>
</edit>
</match>

But I get a error when I launch an application like firefox:
"Fontconfig warning: "local.conf", line 9: invalid constant used : lcddefault"

Any suggestions?


Thanks,
-Darin

[m.s.w]

dman777,
it means, that you don't use this patched cairo and fontconfig.
_________________
Mark Twain said it best:
"If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long!"

[dman777]

I don't understand. I used the fontconfig that was patched and included in vonr's package.

[m.s.w]

Just check it once again, which version of fontconfig and cairo you emerged. Just focus and follow once again above instructions. I did it and it worked. Check if you don't have >x11-libs/cairo-1.4.6 in your /etc/portage/package.mask
_________________
Mark Twain said it best:
"If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long!"

[IvanMajhen]

[m.s.w]

IvanMajhen - sent it to me, I will host it.
_________________
Mark Twain said it best:
"If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long!"

[dman777]

The version in vonr's package is cairo 1.4.14...not cairo 1.4.6 as you mentioned. Is that a problem?

Here's what I have emerged:


localhost ~ # emerge -pv x11-libs/cairo

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] x11-libs/cairo-1.4.14 USE="X glitz svg -debug -directfb -doc -newspr -opengl -xcb" 0 kB [1]

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB
Portage tree and overlays:
[0] /usr/portage
[1] /usr/portage/local/layman/font-overlay
localhost ~ # emerge -pv media-libs/fontconfig

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.5.0-r1 USE="-doc -xml" 0 kB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB
localhost ~ #

[PaulBredbury]

I've created a patch for cairo-ubuntu 1.5.14, to compile with libtool versions 1.5* and 2.2 - see pkgbuild

Edit: Fixed link, thanks to stupid AUR.

[IvanMajhen]

[OmSai]