[HOWTO]New freetype subpixel font rendering for lcd monitors

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IvanMajhen · Post by **IvanMajhen** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 1:59 pm

Read this http://wiki.gentoo-xeffects.org/Font_Re ... nvironment

Hinting must be set to full. Post screenshot.

GoofyX · Post by **GoofyX** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:50 pm

Layman does not list the xeffects overlay anymore. Has anything happened to it?

Dottout · Post by **Dottout** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 10:29 pm

maybe this post explains the reason. xeffects' father left gentoo, even if he still maintains the overlay

m.s.w · Post by **m.s.w** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 6:54 pm

Damn sad story.
Without Daniel Robbins behind the wheel Gentoo is falling...
Kids can't run serius business.
Sad...., really sad.

roderick · Post by **roderick** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 12:03 am

GoofyX wrote:Layman does not list the xeffects overlay anymore. Has anything happened to it?

Check your config file for layman. You changed something or an update did... It's there for me...

* xeffects [Subversion] (source: svn://svn.gentoo-xeffects....)
* xeffects-experimental [Subversion] (source: svn://svn.gentoo-xeffects....)

Check the following option in /etc/layman/layman.cfg:

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nocheck  : yes

If it says no, then set it to yes. I believe that will correct it.

Oh, and xeffects is still alive.

GoofyX · Post by **GoofyX** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 5:25 pm

roderick wrote:Check your config file for layman. You changed something or an update did... It's there for me...

* xeffects [Subversion] (source: svn://svn.gentoo-xeffects....)
* xeffects-experimental [Subversion] (source: svn://svn.gentoo-xeffects....)

Check the following option in /etc/layman/layman.cfg:
Code: Select all
nocheck  : yes
If it says no, then set it to yes. I believe that will correct it.

Yes, that fixed it. However, now the two xeffects overlays are displayed with yellow asterisks... No big deal I guess, the important thing is someone to maintain this overlay.

And speaking of maintaining, I notice that the KDE packages are in slot 0 in the overlay, whereas the official packages are in slot 3.5. Although eix reports those packages as UD (downgrade),

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emerge -vpuD world

does not want to downgrade any package. Should this different slot package allocation create any problems?

roderick · Post by **roderick** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 5:54 pm

GoofyX wrote:Yes, that fixed it. However, now the two xeffects overlays are displayed with yellow asterisks... No big deal I guess, the important thing is someone to maintain this overlay.

This is because the entry in layman for xeffects is missing something trivial, which does not affect the end users ability to sync and use the overlay. Nothing to worry about.

GoofyX wrote: And speaking of maintaining, I notice that the KDE packages are in slot 0 in the overlay, whereas the official packages are in slot 3.5. Although eix reports those packages as UD (downgrade),
Code: Select all
emerge -vpuD world
does not want to downgrade any package. Should this different slot package allocation create any problems?

I think it has to do with the fact that portage is soon to begin not defaulting slot's and therefore you need to specify SLOT in the ebuild (haven't tested out yet). Which means that SLOT needs to be added to my kde ebuilds in the overlay. This is rather odd, as the ebuilds are a direct copy of the portage ones with tweaks. So, it almost seems as those the inheritance of the slot for kde packages does not automatically translate to ebuilds in an overlay. This seems wrong.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it won't necessarily break things as the builds I have modded do not have any slot deps that are broken at this point.

One other possibility is that this all could be "cosmetic" in the emerge/eix view and not actually broken.

So, bottom line - it works, but I will do some additional testing to see if I can figure out what is causing this weird behaviour.

GoofyX · Post by **GoofyX** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 6:18 pm

roderick wrote:So, bottom line - it works, but I will do some additional testing to see if I can figure out what is causing this weird behaviour.

I think we end users owe you a big thanks for this. That's the least we can do from our part.

GoofyX · Post by **GoofyX** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 7:59 am

The xeffects repository seems not to respond. I get a "connection refuse" message.

Just to inform...

hornett · Post by **hornett** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 12:17 pm

GoofyX wrote:The xeffects repository seems not to respond. I get a "connection refuse" message.

Just to inform...

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-575206.html

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 5:53 am

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but is this project still active/necessary? I just today got an LCD monitor and I'm trying to get fonts configured properly for it.

Edit: Never mind. I just started following links and found how to get the xeffects overlay. Then I just followed the wiki article.

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:36 pm

It is still necessary. Project is still active (just no changes were required recently).

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:25 pm

It is amazing how much better the fonts look using the overlay. Between the wiki's suggestions and Paul Bredbury's tip for disabling hinting for bold fonts, even very small text is sharp and clear.

natros · Post by **natros** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 9:12 pm

that's really amazing.
i've have this on last ubuntu and i was impressed.
is there any reason why these patchs are not part of gentoo? is there any issues that we should know about?

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Thu Nov 15, 2007 12:33 am

To make things short - they are just a hack not a proper solution.

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Thu Nov 15, 2007 1:44 am

boniek wrote:To make things short - they are just a hack not a proper solution.

The same could be said for Xorg, and most of Linux for that matter...

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 10:19 am

There is new version of cairo available. I will try to commit new, patched version when I get back from work.

Emopig · Post by **Emopig** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 2:41 pm

boniek,

I hacked up a patch for 1.4.12 earlier today. See here.

Btw, how does "newspr" compare to Dave Turners "cleartype"-like patches? Are they the same but just re-factored?

In his interview with OSNews back in the summer David Turner said:

There is still some possible work on improvement the LCD filtering capabilities that were added in 2.3.0, though the current ones are still very good for a large set of screens.

. He also expresses a distaste for "native" bytecode and says he prefers to let freetype's hinter do the work. Perhaps I will try freetype with the "bindist" USE flag.

vonr · Post by **vonr** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 5:24 pm

newspr == David Turner's patches.

Also, like I mentioned in your other thread and a few pages back in this thread, the guys from PLD Linux are actively maintaining the subpixel patches. See here.

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 6:18 pm

vonr wrote:PLD Linux

That's a slightly different patch. The point being, it's different, and will probably result in a different look.

It's nice to have the choice of so-called lcd, cleartype and xeffects patchsets (which all result in a different look)

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 8:01 pm

Any ETA on the updated cairo in xeffects? The mainline version was bumped due to a security issue.

vonr · Post by **vonr** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 11:04 pm

PaulBredbury wrote:That's a slightly different patch. The point being, it's different, and will probably result in a different look.

That's true; a diff shows some slight differences. However, they both originate from David Turner's original patch from here as can be seen from the comments in the patch. Is there really a visual difference between the two, as you say? Looking at said diff, somehow I doubt it.

The patch maintained by PLD is clearly mentioned to be David Turner's (this is the patch arch calls 'lcd'). The 'xeffects patch' makes no such mention. As I said, apart from some slight differences, it looks to be the same patch albeit adapted for newer cairo versions in a slightly different manner. Could somebody please shed some light on this patch's origin?

The Archlinux 'Cleartype-like'-patch is new to me,

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:57 am

XEffects patch was taken from David Turner's page and corrected to work with newer versions by me.
As for cairo update in overlay - I have working ebuild, but I can't commit it to overlay for some reason.
Here is the tarball with patch (from PaulBredbury) and ebuild.

cvig · Post by **cvig** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:10 am

This is excellent! One question I do have is if the LCD hinting in freetype is enabled by newspr or if that still has to be patched manually to try.

boniek · Post by **boniek** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 6:27 pm

Use freetype from portage tree - it's patched already.