Anti-Aliased Text in X11 Continued

keithp sent in a bit more information about the Font stuff we mentioned yesterday. Besides a nice shot of twm & xterm, Keith sent us proof in the form of a screenshot with Konqueror, the KDE web browser. He also says "Most of this code is in XFree86 CVS today. The hacked Tk and Qt libraries will be available in source form soon. Expect the latter to change; they were pretty seriously whacked. All of the text is rendered with the fine FreeType 2 library using 256 levels of translucency and composited to the screen using hardware acceleration at around 200000 glyphs/sec. If performance becomes an issue, I'm sure we can improve that. These images are regular anti-aliased images not optimized for any particular sub-pixel geometry. With a single X resource change, the text would be rasterized to improve quality for LCD screens as seen here." Now I'm just waiting for mozilla to support this.

Comments

Re:Ugh! Enough with the anti-aliasing fad!!

[spitzak]

You are completely mistaken. Small font resolutions are much more readable with antialaising.

Obvious example is to look at text broadcast on the TV verses the text displayed on the screen by your VCR or cable box. It should be obvious that you can read the TV text at sizes that are far smaller than the box will attempt. This is because the box is not antialiased, while text used by the stations is (especially if it is a video image of a printed piece of text).

I also don't know what AutoCAD is talking about. Antialiased lines are far easier to see than aliased ones, especially if there are many almost-parallel ones at angles slightly off horizontal and vertical. Antialising of thin lines has been done for 25 years in top-of-the-line CAD workstations, despite the extreme (for then) computation overhead. Take a look at any old graphics book.

Re:worth it?

[mattbee]

Yes, dammit! Given that my old Acorn A3000 (based on an 8MHz ARM2, 2MB memory) had anti-aliased fonts switched on by default, and the desktop still flew along nicely (the rendering might have been slow, but the bitmap cache ensured that the desktop was always responsive for a fairly modest outlay of memory). Here's a nice shot of the font rendering. No, I don't use it any more, so I can't possibly be a rabid advocate, but I know from experience that anti-aliasing isn't hard to do efficiently.

worth it?

[tcd004]

Is antiailiased text really worth the extra processor/graphic cycles in most unix applications?

sure, it's great for page layout, but that's why I have a mac.

tcd004 Tired of Election Coverage? How about some UNCOVERAGE?

Re:worth it?

[eXtro]

Yes, for me at least, it would be worth the extra processing power. My previous workstation was a Silicon Graphics O2. It wasn't the most powerful workstation in the world but the display quality was amazing.

The reports I currently am working with require me to analyze them and make decisions based on the information within them. The problem is that these files are about 220 characters wide.

I could reduce the point size on my O2 and still easily read these files. The whole line is available at once, no horizontal scrolling. Very convenient.

I recently 'upgraded' to a linux box. The power in this box absolutely dwarfs my O2, but I can no longer use these small fonts and read stuff. I'm forced to work around it by using a text editor with horizontal scrolling rather than a simple terminal window and 'less'.

I'm still using the same monitor from my O2, so that isn't where the weakness is. Arguably the video card could be spitting out less sharp graphics (nVidia quadro or whatever its called) but most of the impact seems to be from the lack of anti-aliasing.

You've always got the option of not using it, but to make a blanket statement that it isn't useful is inane.

Does Anti-aliased Text Look Better?

[cradle]

I think decent scaled fonts may be more important than anti-aliasing. Take a look at this:

http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$1 90

-David

Re:Does Anti-aliased Text Look Better?

[frantzdb]

Yes and no...

That's an interesting view of anti-aliasing but somewhat closed-minded. The author's main argument is ``Frankly, anti-aliased text just looks bad.'' This is silly. I'll agree that at some sizes with fonts designed for the job anti-aliasing is harder to read. That certainly doesn't make it look bad, though. The problem with anti-aliased text is when it's blurryness makes your eyes strain to try to focus as you read. Non-anti-aliased and slightly anti-aliased font rendering fixes this problem. However, when you are looking at very small letters non-anti-aliased text is illegible. Very large letters, on the other hand look pixelated when not anti-aliased. If you look at a Windows machine, you'll see that normal reading sized fonts are not anti-aliased. Only large and small fonts are. The author also bashes ``ClearType'' for being anti-aliasing, even though it actually uses more ``pixels'' (by addressing each color of the pixels separately).

I'll shut up before I go off on too much of a rant, but it seems like this person simply doesn't understand what he's talking about. Anti-aliasing has limitations but so does your screen.

--Ben

Anti-aliasing won't fix bad fonts

[joshv]

There is only so much anti-aliasing will do to correct bad fonts.

In windows, all of the true type fonts I use look great without anti-aliasing. If you want beautiful fonts in X windows use an X server that supports true type fonts.

-josh

Re:Anti-aliasing won't fix bad fonts

[the coose]

Correct. I would suggest reading the Deuglification HOW-TO. In 10 minutes you can tweak X 3.3.x or 4.0.x to have great looking fonts.

This is no big deal...

[AntiPasto]

I've had anti-aliased text on my xterms for quite a while with this .50 dot pitch 14-inch monitor I have. Hell sometimes it's so anti-aliased I can't even tell if its BSD or Linux...

----

Re:Not bad...

[Abcd1234]

AFAIK, apps have to be modified to make use of the new anti-aliasing features. Of course, if you modify the toolkits (GTK/Qt/Xt/etc) to use the anti-aliasing stuff, you're half way there already.

Anti-aliasing for small fonts

[tjwhaynes]

Sure, AA might look beautiful in higher resolutions, but at a low resolution like 640x480 (or even 800x600), it looks like barf.

Total and utter *&^*&^^.. :-)

Antialiasing improves the readability of a font at small sizes. That's why Acorn went to all the trouble of having it in Risc OS back in 1987- when your vertical resolution can be as low as 256 lines or less, keeping the fonts readable as the point size drops below 6 pts is impossible without anti-aliasing. They had this resolution because that was back in the days where people used their tellies as monitors.

Furthermore, some fonts were meant to be shown without anti-aliasing (MS Sans Serif, Times New Roman, and Arial in Windows; I'm sure there's some in X).

Thats because MS still hasn't got it's antialiasing working properly - hence MS 'font smoothing' is an appropriate title. Anti-aliasing is not just about blurring the edges - it is about increasing the apparent resolution of the text by using greyscales - the same way a truecolour phot has a higher apparent resolution than a black-and-white 2 colour image on the same display. Doing it right has a massive effect on the readability of the text on screen. Because MS's implementation doesn't cut it at small point sizes, they tweaked the truetype fonts to render more reliably to the screen instead.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes