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QT 2.3, With Anti-Aliased Fonts
Hazzl noted the announcement that the New version of QT is out. While normally a release of a GUI toolkit isn't that big of a deal, but this release is significant since it is the first Open Source toolkit to make a non-beta release with X-Render support for Anti-Aliased Fonts. Congrats to all the Developers involved.
export QT_XFT=1
I had AA fonts working for a while with KDE 2.0 and X4.0.2. Worked great when my card's DRI module was loaded, but without the hardware acceleration it was super slow.
I eventually reverted to my standard setup, cause all the different alpha/beta/gamma/dela libraries and such were causing my machine to freak out. I'll try it again when its stable.
On a related note, I upgraded to KDE 2.1 yesterday, and got-DAMN does it whoop ass. Faster, more polished, more solid, better looking, and has lots of cool new gizmos to play with. Konqueror has made great strides. It's on par with Internet Explorer 4.x right now, and if it keeps up the momentum, will catch up to IE 5.5 in no time. No need to complain any longer about Linux not having a world class browser. It's here now, or at least very, very close. Kmail 1.2 is also a really nice email client.
Can't wait to see the final GNOME 1.4. I keep waffling between the two environments. It's nice to see both of them progressing so well.
That was a long-ass, train-of-consciousness ramble, for which I make no apologies.
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Ok, what are the options out there for open-source outlined fonts. Are you saying that the AA libraries on Linux are doing a poorer job of actually rendering the fonts, or are you saying that there simply aren't any open true type fonts out there?
Or both?
Tomorrow, I'll think of a better
Hey, who said that all OSs aren't in the dumps? Linux's core is very sound, but all of the GUI stuff is in its toddler stages (and slow, very very slow). BeOS's GUI is sound, but the core is quirky. Nothing in Windows is sound, but DirectX saves it, as does hardware support. QNX has the neatest networking, but its filesystem is trash. The OS market these days is just one big comprimise, there IS no certifiably best OS out there, even if you constrain your market to something small like video or audio workstations. BeOS has the MediaKit, Linux has the insanely fast filesytem (XFS).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Check your facts, dude.
Of course the smoothed screen fonts are bitmaps, your whole screen is a bitmap.
Windows renders to the screen context to view e.g. a web page, and since it's a color device, it takes advantage of that by anti-aliasing the fonts.
When you go to print, it re-renders the fonts to the printer context, which is probably mono, and of a significantly higher resolution than the screen, anyway, so it's a good idea to re-render.
After rendering (in either case) the result is a bitmap.
How can you be so wrong and yet so convinced of your correctness that you had to make an epmhatic statement like that? Feel stupid?
Also, as long as we're at it, how would you compare BeOS's font rendering engine with Linux's (which I guess in OpenType), MacOS's and Window's? Since I use laptops exclusively, I can't wait until sub-pixel rendering is easy to do under at least Linux, then BeOS then Windows.
Erik
Tomorrow, I'll think of a better
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I didn't mean anything bad by it. I admire all the people who have worked so hard on the OSS movement. I just find it funny some of the things Linux users get excited about. (And yes, I get excited too. I'm excited about KDE 2.1, the upcoming accelerated NVIDIA XRender drivers, KDevelop, and an i686-optimized version of Gentoo Linux.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is off by default you have to set an environmental variable to turn it on for QT.
I think he was talking printing of screenshots. To tell the truth, ANY OS will have this problem, so I have no idea WTF he is talking about. And who prints screenshots anyway?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Linux is now easy enough for an old mainframe COBOL plodder like me. Not long before the home market now :-)
If you print screenshots, what do you expect? And who would print screenshots full of text to get a readable hardcopy of that text anyway?
Why don't you just choose the 'Print' option from the application, rather than capturing the screen and then printing it? That way you'll get output correctly formatted for the device you're writing to (e.g. the printer).
1. Get X 4.0.2 source or the snapshot. 4.0.2 has the rendering extention necessary for AA'ed and RGB decimated fonts. Also get all the other software - KDE 2.1, Qt 2.3.0, etc. You get the picture. Also, you MUST get Freetype 2.0 source!
2. Build Freetype2. There's a little hack you must do here on some systems for X to compile properly. In your /usr/local/include/freetype2 directory (which is the default location for Ft2's headers), symlink ft2build.h to freetype/config/ft2build.h. This many not be necessary on all systems... it was for me. Minor problem.
3. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT (HARD) PART! X configures itself rather stupidly in most cases as far as we have seen. hosts.def overrides all these annoying settings and lets you tweak precisely for your needs... so, let's make sure it does it right. Create a new config/cf/hosts.def file in your XFree86 source directory (commonly /usr/src/xc) - note that commented out items are detected at compile time specifically for your platform:
#define DebuggableLibraries NO
/*#define SharedLibGlu NO*/
/*#define NormalLibGlu NO*/
/*#define FSUseSyslog YES */
/*#define HasKatmaiSupport NO */
/* Tweak for your system or remove altogether.*/ /* this appears to be broken */
/*#define BuildDebug NO */
/*#define BuildXF86DRI NO*/
/*#define BuildXF86DRIDriverSupport NO*/ /* this seems to be broken too */
/* Use this if we're going to use external Freetype2 libs instead..*/ /usr/local
#define SharedLibXdmGreet YES
#define LinkGLToUsrInclude YES
#define LinkGLToUsrLib YES
#define SharedLibFont YES
#define SharedLibXft YES
#define SharedLibXrender YES
#define HasZlib YES
#define HasAgpGart YES
#define HasMMXSupport YES
#define Has3DNowSupport YES
#define BuildGLULibrary YES
#define BuildXF86DRM YES
#define DefaultGcc2i386Opt -O2 -fno-strength-reduce -mpentiumpro
#define JoystickSupport NO
#define XF86XAA YES
#define BuildFontServer YES
#define BuildFreeType YES
#define BuildXTrueType YES
#define BuildGlxExt YES
# define BuildRender YES
# define BuildGLXLibrary YES
# define BuildXvLibrary YES
# define BuildXF86DGALibrary YES
# define BuildXF86DGA YES
# define BuildXvExt YES
# define UsbMouseSupport NO
#define Freetype2Dir
4. Build X using a make World and make install (you can make logs of course if you want). You may have some problems... they're usually pretty easy to iron out - and I won't go into how here. Make sure you back up your existing X11 binary tree.
5. Configure X... do the whole thing. Try starting X with the bare basics. (Duh-step. :-)
6. If X is working, download this file...
...and extract it in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
http://keithp.com/~keithp/fonts/truetype.tar.gz
7. Download this file...
...edit it and copy it to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
http://keithp.com/~keithp/fonts/XftConfig
8. Start X again... this time, try to open an Xterm with the command:
xterm -fa courier
If the font is AA'ed... then BINGO! It works!
9. If you succeeded at 8, build Qt 2.3.0 and KDE 2.1 as you normally would. Read the docs. And there you go! Have fun! AA'ed fonts. :-)
That is sweeeeet! I use grip on WindowMaker. After seeing all these new goodies, I may pull down KDE in order to run Konqueror. I just wish konq came as a seperate package.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
video codec ... Sorensen ... Apple
You're thinking of QuickTime, rather than the communist-looking Qt toolkit used as KDE's widget set.
textual display information imbedded into movies now?
<OT>This has been in quicktime for a while (since at least 3.0).</OT>
Back on topic: will qt free edition (or xfree86) ever be ported to windows 9x?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes and no, depending on the implementation. A simple anti-aliasing of a given bit of text at a given resolution will decrease the detail of the font. A form of supersampling, using a higher resolution bitmap to generate an antialiased smaller version will add detail, at the expense of losing background detail. Luckily the background we're talking about is usually a solid color, so detail, schmetail...
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Okay. And how exactly does any of this demonstrate the "fallacies of OOP"?
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
It's free for any Open Source application. You are not limited to the GPL (what kind of freedom would that be?). You can choose BSD, MPL, QPL, MIT, Artistic, or any other Free Source license.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
...but is it sub-pixel antialiased? That was on CmdrTaco's GUI wish list.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I agree with you on KDE 2.1 100% (if not 120%). I hadn't tried it in years (didn't really use X and when I did whatever lightwieght wm was fine) and I was astonished at how much it has improved. It is a completely different beast - extremely usable, looks good, feels good, works good. There are still a few annoyances but they are very minor. If you haven't tried KDE recently check out 2.1!
...will it support dead keys (accented characters, where you first press the accent, then the letter)? So far, this has been on and off for a while. 2.2.2 botched it, 2.2.3 fixed it, 2.2.4 botched it again... Somewhat hard to type French text, if the accents don't work properly.
After using Windows ME and Windows 2000, I must say that Microsoft OSs crash far more often than Linux does. My LFS build only crashed one time and it was while I was installing Wine! (What a coincidence) Windows crashes AT LEAST 1 time an hour. (And that's when I'm not using Windows Media Player or some shits like this.) And, that's on a clean install! So, windows users, you can continue to let microsoft owners laugh of you and make billions of dollars. I will not support a crappy corporation which will soon possess the whole planet in its quest of power. In fact, it represents everything I hate in this world.
Excellent post! Thank you! It made me realize that it's not really worth it. You saved me many hours. :-)
Mature products are somewhat better, but not dramatically so than their predecessors. IE 5 is perhaps better than 4, but not so dramatically better than 4 was than 3. MS will have a hell of a time making sure IE 6 isn't worse than 5.5.
The impressive thing about KDE an Gnome is how dramatically and rapidly better they are getting. This suggests that they haven't neared anything like a plateau, and that the commercial GUI vendors may find themselves lapped in the next eighteen months. It's easy to criticize these desktops since they are evolving in the open and all their early awkwardness is exposed for all to see.
Already they are at or near the magic boiling point of usability for most people. If you are much better than your predecessor but not good enough you're still not good enough. But good enough and rapidly getting better is a different story.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You'll notice that it's also under the LGPL. Sheesh.
i noticed you also left the "linux" aliased, and italized to boot (makes aliased fonts look even worse), while you used a bold, AA "Microsoft". Going for subliminal messages, hmm ... ?
Read 'em and weep, Linux people. MS people use dirty tricks (just like the company they promote). Hiss!
I'd like to see how they define UNIX platform. Does NT's POSIX count as a UNIX platform? Does BeOS count as a UNIX platform? This UNIX bigotry has got to stop! Making it free for OSS and pay for commercial is one thing. Doing the same for UNIX and Windows is just punishing a developer for not liking *NIX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is supposed to do so, but an overapplication of smoothing can make things look fuzzy, which will have your eyes trying to focus better. Of course, this is impossible as the original is blurry (by definition of AA).
This is where clear type and sub-pixel AA on LCDs kicks ass, as it doesn't suffer from the blur problem of CRTs.
There is an art to choosing good convolution kernels for AA, and judging from these comments, it seems that different people on different output devices have different optimal kernels. I hope the final product has this as a configuration option.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Hello. How do I turn sub-pixel rendering on? I'm running on a laptop (toshiba sattelite if that makes any difference). I'm running KDE 2.1 with qt 2.3.0 (and the anti-aliasing looks great! Or at least, better than without it)
Erik
Tomorrow, I'll think of a better
Just a guess though.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I used a beta of Qt for a while with KDE 2.1 and while the anti-aliasing looks very good it seems to create more eyestrain than the anti-aliasing in Windows (2000 at the moment). Too much of a good thing...
Believe me, it makes a big difference and it gives you a lot of time that you can spend working on something other than you PC. :-)
You forget. The majority of computers run an OS that is not case sensitive. Thus, there is a very good chance that at the trademark office, Qt.tm == QT.tm
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
where can we find some screenshots?? i wish i knew c++ to code apps for it
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Yes, Gnome is nice, but did you know that there are KDE bindings for C++, java, python and perl? Python is also the common scripting language built into most major apps. If you want to, you can even access all exposed internal functions in KDE apps at the command line (via dcop), allowing things like bash scripting of GUI programs.
I'm not saying Gnome is bad at all -- but since you're saying "First time I started using C++, I thought what a hideous hack!", I figured you might be under the assumption that you have to use C++ to develop KDE apps. Yes, KDE itself is written in C++, but its apps are open to several languages.
In fact, KDevelop also has templates and good support for building Gnome and commandline apps. So you can even use KDE while developing Gnome apps, if you'd like.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Yes, Qt supports unicode on all supported platforms. And, unlike under MFC, you use the same API for everything, even Win95 vs NT/2000.
-- "Big Brother is Watching..."
True enough. Ideally users should be able to open a "tuning wizard" that would be able to help you tune the system for speed vs glitz, and slimness vs bloat.
But in the meantime, there's no reason why elite users like yourself can't figure out how to turn stuff like this off, is there?
Ummm...I thought QT was used in KDE, GTK in gnome....
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Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
Is it possible to program for KDE using plain old C?
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
No offense, but you should really check to make sure anti-aliasing is working before you post that it causes more eyestrain than W2K.
*YOU WERE NOT USING AA FONTS*
Why, because nvidia's X server does not currently support the render extension and so anti-aliased fonts will not work with it.
I hate anti-aliased fonts, they always look blurry to me. Mucho eyestrain.
AA simply modifies the colour of the pixel based on what percentage of the 'line' passes through it.
e.g.you have a 1pt (.72in) thick line, from 0.5,0.5 to 30.8,20.12
the line's area - here, a 'line' is really a transformed rectangle (or polygon in the case of a line with a more complex style), will cover some pixels almost entirely, and only partially cover other pixels.
So we simply colour any pixel that the line intersects with a grey value proportional to the area of the pixel covered by the line.
This does require a fair bit more work, since our line drawing algorithm is now more complex than simple bresenhams.
Compositing is also an issue, since handling the intersections of multiple antialiased lines can produce annoying visual artifacts due to additive alpha values etc.
Well, does matter that Debian had Qt Xft AA two weeks ago? For your information, I have had Qt Xft since 3 months ago. But I'm not going to go about bragging that my distro got it before all the others. I'm not a Debian user. I use Linux, but I don't even use a distro. All I had to to was to get qt-copy from KDE CVS (i.e. cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.kde.org:/home/kde co qt-copy) and replace my current Qt with that. qt-copy will always have the latest Qt with fresh bugfixes and such, and was previously the only source for Xft AA in the latest Qt as th only other Xft source was the original 2.2.2 patch released by Keith Packard.
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Oooh, you're right! I'm swiching back to windoze right now! Hey, it's no big secret that Linux doesn't do AA as well as windows. Nobody's going to be shocked about this.
I've been running KDE 2.1 on QT 2.2.4 and XFree86 4.0.2 just fine. (It's BEAUTIFUL, by the way!) Now I want to try anti-aliased fonts.
Firstly - I have the current CVS for the DRI drivers, which includes the Xft, Xrender, etc. library sections. I managed to get freetype2 built and installed (I think! There were some problems...), and configured the hosts.def file accordingly. I managed to get everything to build and install...but then KDE wouldn't start. (KSplash complaining about undefined symbols in the Xft library).
I figured maybe I needed to rebuild KDE (at least KDELIBS) against the new X stuff, so I tried. Firstly, the 2.1 configure script complains about 2.3.0 not being "QT >= 2.2.3", but I got around THAT. Trying to build, it errors out with similar complaints about undefined symbols in Xft...
So (to finally get to the point)...I figure either I need to rebuild QT (my next try), or I didn't actually successfully build freetype2, or I have to build all of X from scratch...
Anybody know any good "shortcuts" for me to add support for this feature? (I'm running on a "Slackware-Post-7.1" based distribution if it matters...)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Anyone know when similar improvements to GTK are coming out?
AFAIK, The font handling in gtk+ 1.2 makes implementing the new scheme painful (although there are some hacks around if you really want it...). Gtk+ 2.0 will have AA support supposedly, with much better font handling all round.
Phil--
nosig
Mac OS has had anti-aliased fonts since...before EVER. maybe someday you will learn that windows sucks.
KDE develops in C++, GNOME develops in kludgey "object oriented" C.
There's nothing kludgy about the GTK object oriented model - in fact, the only kludges are in QT and KDE, which require horrific hacks and extra software layers just to allow you to use languages other than C++. So fuck off back to VB, and stop trying to be intelligent.
It is just as good everywhere - provided you don't forget to compile in Unicode support on Windows (otherwise you won't be able to cut and past Unicode text between Qt and other Windows applications). I've written a large application with Python and Qt that depends extensively on Unicode support: http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/linguistics, and I was very glad to see that my app worked equally well on Windows as on Linux.
Perhaps it's a very large patch.
(a big delta)
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Microsoft has released a set of high quality TrueType web fonts: Times, Courier, Arial, Comic, Impact under a license that allows free use and redistribution.
.exe but it's a self-extracting zipfile. You can open it with unzip.
Get it Here.
The extension is
Someone has also packaged it as an RPM
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Unfortunately Microsoft's "anti-aliasing" still isn't as good as existed on home machines in 1987... an interesting comparison of RISC OS vs. Windows' font renders contains these two examples:
Down at the bottom of the first page is an example from a reimplementation of RISC OS' font manager on Linux, which does look nice! ;-)
Could your post your config please? I used the qt-2.2.4 rpm that came with the kde 2.1 download for Redhat 6.x . What config files do I need to change to make dead keys work?
> See:éóáû Got it?
Proves nothing. Could have been typed in from another version of qt, or from a non-qt app (such as ... netscape)
Thanks,
after all they're contributing XFS why not a few fonts while they're at it ... ;-)
As I recall they were type1 but still very nice.
So you can do OOP in C ... what a novel
idea.
But the question is how many people
can do this or are willing to do this>
The reason why KDE is more successful in
attracting new developers than Gnome is simply
that you just have to know standard C++,
take something like Kdevelop, read
some well documented class libraries and
of you kde-go
There're lots of "untapped" developers
who can do that, but would be somewhat
streched (or unwilling) to get into
the gtk/gnome development model
(which is much more unix-ish)...
So IMHO, that KDE/Qt are based on C++
(a fully fledged OOP language) rather
than C, is the key to their success
(plus of course the relative freedom
of developers choosing the way of the
project, rather
than redhat or sun doing it for you)
BTW, i am a fvwm user ;)
antialiased fonts, now you guys are really trying to get me to use Linux again aren't you. hmmm.....tempting very tempting....
Another tip for Debian is to install gs-x11fonts. This adds a few symlinks to the Ghostscript fonts, allowing them to be using in X. They work fine with anti-aliasing with Qt.
Whoa Michel!
My bad???
Take it easy buddy! Burn some karma.
Cheers,
Matt
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
I recognize the style, or lack thereof. Vague assertions, no substance.
Magnus.I posted a few screen shots of my KDE desktop here
http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/grantl/kde/
Taken of KDE 2.1.9=>20010223 ( ie.. a recent cvs snapshot ) and QT 2.3.0
ps. my real colors aren't quite that ugly, blame it on the jpeg compression effects ( ie. more reddish less "muddy" )
I'd like to see how they define UNIX platform.
You mean for licensing purposes? Qt Free is GPL, so you can port it to any platform.
Does NT's POSIX count as a UNIX platform? Does BeOS count as a UNIX platform?
Currently, Qt Free requires a working POSIX subsystem (NT's is subpar but Red Hat Cygwin is good) and an X11 server. XFree86 works on Windows NT/2K but not on 9x because of stupid assumptions in the design of Windows 9x's USER and GDI servers. (Why oh why didn't Microsoft just release NT 4 as Windows 95?)
free for OSS and pay for commercial is one thing. Doing the same for UNIX and Windows is just punishing a developer for not liking *NIX.
It's not punishing but instead "not wasting effort on porting a free software package to an environment that's thought to be hostile to free software."
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The official announcement is here: http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/qt-230.h tml
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
since some minutes ago the audiocd: io-slave can save the ripped audio files in mp3- (using LAME) or Ogg-Vorbis format (using libvorbis). Kudos go to Carsten Duvenhorst . There are additional top-level dirs "MP3" and "Ogg Vorbis", under them the tracks are listed with extension ".mp3" and ".ogg". When copied from there the destination is automatically compressed by one of the methods. If the CD-info was backed by CDDB also Id3V1 tags are created for the mp3 case, and normal tags for vorbis.
You can now simply rip the contents of a complete CD from konqui by simply opening the "MP3/" directory selecting all files there, and copy them to another real directory, which is rather cool. (The only thing which must be done, is to give the dest dir a good name, as the mp3 dir has no subdir identifying the CD). The bitrate for mp3 can be selected by an "br=196" (e.g. to set it to 196 KBps) query argument to the URL.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to try this out without putting down $1600 buck? How about a student discount?
Don't get me wrong I think a good library/set of tools should charge what it's worth. But, I'd like to try it out and I don't think I can get my company to simply shell out the cash.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I think I see the problem. (Er, no pun intended.)
:)
On my desk as I type this, I have a laptop with a nice, crisp (but jaggy) non-anti-aliased display, and another machine running an older version of Linux and X displayed on a cheap 14" monitor that achieves anti-aliasing but the simple method of having a slightly out-of-focus display. (Dang cheap magnet coils, or something). I can read either at length without bother.
However, when I look at a screen shot of an antialiased display on this nice crisp LCD, it bugs me. I think the problem is that because the rest of the screen has sharp lines and text, my eyes keep trying to bring the AA'd text into focus -- obviously without success. On the CRT, however, the whole screen is "soft focus" so my eyes just give up and go with the flow.
Shrug. As long as it's something I can turn off (by font, perhaps?), I like the idea. Maybe its just that my eyes burned out long ago reading dot-matrix printouts and 80x25 character dumb terminal screens. They expect anything on a monitor to be jaggy
-- Alastair
Biddies in the Slashdot lounge,
All they do is they whine and scrounge....
Yes, I am right. I spend my days looking at a screen, so I do care what the letters on that screen look like. Oh well, never mind, maybe one of those open-source chappies will go take a look at Microsoft's white papers and bother to implement font smoothing the way it should be done.
That's gsfonts-x11, great tip anyway, thanks!
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I was indeed aware of KDE's language bindings. It's very good to see Gnome and KDE embrace language flexibility and choice. I haven't played around with KDevelop much--didn't know it could be used for Gnome development. I'll have to give it a shot. I'm a fan of using a combination of tools to get the job done. I use gdb and vim for the most part while in UNIX and at work I'm a Visual C++ developer.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I have bought a Diamond Stealth S540 recently, and I found out X 4.0 doesn't support it. That's one damn bad thing for Linux: I would love to have AA in KDE, but unfortunately I have that big problem. Anyone knows if there's a X 4.0 driver for the S540 video board? Any link? I would appreciate a lot.- ----
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
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Sorry! At work, without access to my Debian box. If only my area had ADSL.
You can use the fantastic kdevelop, which now comes bundled with KDE 2.1, and QT designer, a GUI design tool. The combo works very well. Reminds me of MS Visual Studio... but better.
"It must be something truly enormous, Trismegistus"
Heh. One more reason for the LINE project to succeed. ;)
And for that matter, when will there be a Linux distro with TT font installation that consists of nothing more than copying the font to a directory? Even running a custom applet to install fonts isn't always the right answer (think: programmatic operation).
Actually, the Gnome codebase is quite well maintained. It's not perfect, but we're working on it. Perhaps you could list specific hard-core facts, rather than making assertions with no basis. If you do have a basis for saying that Gnome will collapse under its own weight in a few months, I'd love to hear it. As someone who has spent significant time looking at the Gnome framework, and being both a C and C++ developer, I can attest to the flexibility of the core C-based architecture with powerful bindings for languages of all sorts--C++, java, python, perl, etc. The Gnome framework, IMHO, is extremely powerful, flexible, and getting even better all the time. Now of course, if you're not used to something you may find it confusing at first. :) First time I started using C++, I thought what a hideous hack! With time I've come to appreciate the advantages of both C and C++. It's great to be able to use both.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
This is the first version of a GUI toolkit that has it's own song as mp3. Very nice cover indeed and a funny idea.
With anti-aliased fonts printing of screenshots is nearly impossible, because of the anti-aliasing: the printer can't re-aliase and then do it's own anti-aliasing. It anti-aliases the fonts again, therefore you can read a 1280x1024 screen with a small font (aliased or not), but you can't read the printout if aliased
It would be nice to rerender for a printout - without aliasing
Windows has this problem too.
A good font smoother -- like the one in Microsoft OSes ever since Win95 Plus Pack (over five years ago, folks!) -- only anti-aliases problem areas in diagonals and curves. Furthermore, it should only be applied to text above a certain type size.
For more details, see Microsoft Typgraphy. For an example of how not to do things, see TN 1149: Smoothing Fonts at Apple.
One of the main reasons GNOME is using C as opposed to C++ is that C is more portable and far more supported across platforms. If you are stuck on an AIX RS6000 machine with a "quirky" compiler you'll understand how this goes.
:-)
And another thing, just because something is written in C automatically means no "object oriented" code. You can accomplish OOP in C by various mechanisms that all work even though C itself doesn't naitively support OOP. X (which KDE depends on anyway) and Gnome and Win32 all work on the concept of a modifying a "black box object". It is interesting to note that there are C++ bindings built on these toolkits!
And let us not forget that OOP code doesn't automatically mean better written code. Some of the neatest code I've seen (in Perl btw) doesn't require OOP.
Does Gnome need to be written in C++? No because they found that the extra synax was just sugar. I have no problem with Gnome and GTK being written in C because others will come along and implement C++ wrapping around it(just like MFC).
It may very well be that I just don't "get" antialiasing...but I thought I understood the basic concept. That being the case, this question sounds funny to me.
Isn't "antialiasing" (to oversimplify) a form of "intelligent blurring"? (In this case, blurring the fonts corners a bit so that they blend a little smoother with the background).
If so...don't you LOSE detail (while improving the actual appearance) when you antialias?
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Sort of like Microsofties getting excited about Microsoft finally producing a stable OS after only 22 years of trying.
What is the QT's support for internationalization on all platforms. I know that KDE runs in 33 languages and that QT is Unicode based. What I'd like to find out (because I'm selecting a GUI toolkit for my company) is whether Unicode is this good on all platforms that QT supports including Win95/98? Anyone with some experience with QT on these particular OSes?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
...and they did it better, than any other implementation I have seen so far.
With "better" I mean: faster, better integrated into the OS and with much better (visual) quality.
Anti-aliasing in RISC OS did not just blur the edges to make the characters look better, it really enhanced the readability of fonts.
Does anyone know whether nVidia is going to support XRender in their drivers? I have TNT2, and after switching from nVidia's 0.9-6 drivers to "nv" driver that comes with XFree86 I've got DPMS (which perhaps is considered unnecessary by nVidia programmers), XRender, and 10-20 extra megabytes of free memory (X has smaller footprint now). But AA font rendering is pretty slow, and I think this can be improved if XRender support is done by nVidia. Also, at the moment I have to use separate XF86Config for Quake.
WINE 1.0 has support for antialiasing. But it probably doesn't qualify because it does it on the client side, i.e. it works with XFree86-3.x.x and even Exceed if you are such a pervert :-)
How stupid can I get? To my defense: what the orginal poster was saying has nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is on-screen font anti-aliasing.
My bad, sorry, etc.
I'd rather use Linux and contribute what I can while I wait for certain features, vs using Micro$quish products that crash all the time and cost a fortune.
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If you pronounce it letter by letter, she^H^H^H^Hit's a real QT. :-)
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Sorry pivo ;)
...is the difference between interpolation and anti-aliasing?
I have hardware fullscreen anti-aliasing built into my old 20" monitor!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I take it you haven't looked at Gnome lately? I've got both on my system, and they are approximately equivalent in both form and function.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
It was a matter of apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and tweaking the XftConfig file to include your Truetype font dirs.
Note that you do need to get some decent fonts from somwhere that support antialiasing. Not all Truetype fonts do. Alot of nice Windows fonts support AA tho.
A good source of free fonts is here: http://www.fontfreak.com
If debian users need more help the debian-kde mailing list is active and helpful.
At this point I would also like to thank Ivan the maintainer for KDE in debian. He is doing an awesome job!
Dave
Quick Toolkit? Quickie Toolkit? QuomndrTaco Toolkit? (ducks and runs)
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Now if only NVidia had RENDER extension support in its binary driver........ argh
~GoRK
http://www.comnet.ca/~foxtrot/dela/
/me wonders how to code an X-Render compatible toon....
it's the taking apart that counts
Yes, it will be possible and in the KDE CVS in about a month - I'm working on C now (along with Objective-C/GNUstep Foundation kit bindings). I've just recently checked in Java JNI based bindings for Qt and KDE. Please see the language bindings section on the KDE site. You need to check out the 'kdebindings' module from the KDE CVS to get the code. Richard Dale, Lost Highway Ltd
The Risc OS fonts are blurry and wouldn't really be useful for day to day computer use. Looking at them gave me a headache in anticipation.
Risc OS's antialiasing scheme was a cheap dirty hack, its just a square pixel routine for supersampling. This is exactly what true-type was built to avoid. (and why risc'os brags that it was faster than true-type.)
The reason Microsoft font antialiasing looks better is that it is not true super-sample antialiasing. Square subpixel antialiasing creates blurryness where there should be none, such as in straight vertical and horizontal lines. Microsoft's engine only does anti-aliasing on curves and diagonal lines that exceed some threshhold of pixel jumpiness.
And BTW: this is the true-type recommended way of dealing with fonts.
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Okay, I didn't realize it'd require a port. However, I take offense to your "hostile to free software" comment. Windows has an extensive freeward community
I assume "freeward" is a misspelling for "freeware." In that case, I know about all royalty-free binaries, but most of them are not free software. There's a difference.
OSS software does not need to run on an OSSOS.
But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license. Tough luck getting Microsoft to comply there. (Or is the VB runtime covered by the operating system exception to the common licenses?)
And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
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Wow! It's amazing that a volunteers and weekend warriors can do all this stuff when it took all the other systems acres of cubicles and herds of managers to get it done.
Check to see how long Internet Explorer has been around. Now compare that to Konqueror. If that doesn't knock your socks off then you aren't wearing any.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Examples of the freetype library in action in Xft can be found on Keith Packard's website here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/
Examples of subpixel sampling (a.k.a. `clear-type' in MS-speak) can be found here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/clear.html
Please don't propagate MS FUD.
Thanks,
Daniel
Anyone know when similar improvements to GTK are coming out? I like AA fonts (it's the only way for me to use some fonts on an 800x600 laptop screen), but KDE's too big for my tastes.
Read 'em and weep, Linux people. Read 'em and weep.
Another thing that will make my new machine slower than the old one.
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
So, according to your logic, I couldn't license a Perl program under the BSD license, since it would conflict with the GPL?
If you plan to link in both a GPL'd library (module, whatever) and a proprietary library that doesn't come with the OS, there would be a conflict. If you plan to link in a GPL'd library and also use the old advertising clause version of the BSD license, there would be a conflict.
BeOS is proprietory, and I use OSS software all the time.
There are two types of libraries that can be linked into a GPL'd program: (a) GPL compatible libraries and (b) libraries that are included with the operating system distribution and are distributed separately from the program. BeOS programs use the latter, but the MS Visual Basic runtime is neither.
There wasn't a large library of free software on UNIX either, until GNU came along.
There wasn't a large library of free software anywhere until the GNU project, especially because Richard M. Stallman apparently invented the copyleft that keeps free software free.
Don't tell me the same can't be done on Windows.
This seems to imply that a "critical mass" of free software will be achieved much faster on free operating systems. Go spread the word about Wine (a free clone of Windows that runs on top of POSIX+X11). Get it installed at your local LUG's installfest, and you'll see more free software on Windows, as users create programs that run both on their free OS (Wine) and their friends' systems (MS Windows).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One more thing. You must add the line to the [KDE] section of your ~/.kde/share/config/global...
AntiAliasing=true
"I can see clearly now two-three has come,
:)
I can see all the objects on the page
Gone are the dark fonts that made my head ache
Thanks to those bright, bright Trolls, hacking away"
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Thus, on Windows 95, a GPL program could not link to DirectX (which isn't a part of the OS proper).
I guess I misinterpreted "operating system." If it comes with the operating system distribution or can be obtained as part of an OS vendor's upgrade package, it is considered part of the OS; "the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable." It seems you just have to make DirectX 8 or the Visual Basic libraries a separate download and make a case for "this is an OS vendor sanctioned OS upgrade."
how does the license of the language one uses in any way related to the license of the software?
Not the license of the language itself, but the license of the libraries used to implement the language. For example, the C language itself has no license, whereas Cygwin (a Win32 implementation of POSIX, including gcc) has a GPL libc, infecting just about every program (unless you use the msvcrt.dll support, in which case you fall under the OS exception).
Does this mean that it isn't morally wrong to make a developer pay for a toolkit just because the OSS community doesn't like his preferred OS? Does a GPL program on Windows count any less than a GPL program on Linux?
The Windows version of Qt that Trolltech sells may contain GPL incompatible code licensed from other entities; it costs money to develop GPL compatible code. This is part of why Mozilla took so long to replace some of the features of older Netscape releases. But Qt Free Edition is under GPL; you are free to start a project to port it to whatever platform you choose. According to QT's README, "If you want to port Qt to a new platform, please read the PORTING file."
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Windows version of Qt that Trolltech sells may contain GPL incompatible code licensed from other
entities; it costs money to develop GPL compatible code. This is part of why Mozilla took so long to replace
some of the features of older Netscape releases. But Qt Free Edition is under GPL; you are free to start a
project to port it to whatever platform you choose. According to QT's README, "If you want to port Qt to a
new platform, please read the PORTING file.
>>>>>>>>
You're hedging. I can understand Qt's position, but in general, is it morally right to charge OSS Windows developers for toolkits that *NIX guys get for free?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...