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Anti-Aliased Fonts For GNOME
McVeigh revels in this posting at Gnotices site which reads: "GDKFXT transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your application.'" He adds "I'm running it now -- it it looks great!!"
Not to be a stick in the mud, but I didn't notice much, if any, improvement when trying it. Of course I'm already operating at reasonably high resolution to start with, so there's going to be somewhat less room for improvement through anti-aliasing, but it's certainly not dramatic. The other disadvantage is that it's only for the one theme, so you can't take advantage if you want to keep using your existing theme. And, as they mention but don't emphasize, it's only for widgets not for all fonts, so the value was rather limited to start with.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Basically anti-aliasing (in this case) means the use of grayscale to make better looking text (or graphics).
By using gray pixels around the edge of text, the "jaggyness" of text can be made to appear to be less.
For an illustration look at the top of Apple's home page, http://www.apple.com.
The "text" "Welcome to Apple" at the top is not really text - it is part of a graphic that uses color and grayscale. The characters appear smoother than regular Mac or PC text. Note where it says "What's Hot". It looks much smoother than the regular html text in the headline below it, even though it is about the same size. Note also that anti-aliasing can make text look fuzzy or out of focus.
It is kinda like using interpolation to smooth out a graph.
The higher DPI (dots per inch), the more possible it would be to use this to make better looking text. However, on some systems, this would require new fonts and a complete rewrite of the "engine" that controls writing to the screen. GTK is low-level enough that something like this is able to make all your GTK text anti-aliased.
Anti-aliasing will really show it's merrits in the Web browswer (such as Mozilla that supports anti-aliasing on some platforms) and in graphics, and even some small games.
The "text" "Welcome to Apple" at the top is not really text - it is part of a graphic that uses color and grayscale. The characters appear smoother than regular Mac or PC text. Note where it says "What's Hot". It looks much smoother than the regular html text in the headline below it, even though it is about the same size.
Not in OmniWeb in OS X it doesn't; everything is beautifully anti-aliased. Which brings up an interesting point: not all anti-aliasing is created equal. This is very noticeable in OS X, which (for legacy reasons) actually has two different algorithms for it. Loading up the same page in IE (which uses QuickDraw) and OmniWeb (which uses CoreGraphics) makes the differences obvious. So, how good is the GTK anti-aliasing? Anyone got a screenshot?
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And here is what your
Try it! Your desktop will look much better, and it won't hurt your eyes anymore. Of course you can tweak the point sizes a little.
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But I guess the point would be that there are more fonts out there beyond MS-Verdana and Times New Roman (but I admit to using these heavily), and Sun for one has provided fonts of very high quality with their StarOffice distribution. I won't speculate on the license of said fonts, however.
You are speaking in generalities, and confusing your limited experience for a universal principle. On your moinitor, maybe, AA fonts look blurry
No, actually YOU are guilty of doing exactly that. The original poster was 100% correct.
Antialiasing does not solve the problem of displaying fonts at small sizes. Only hinting does this.
Antialiasing can HELP, and is easier, and perhaps for you it is an acceptable solution, but it is equally capable of making it even HARDER to read small type because of the inability for the antialiasing to take into consideration the INTENT of the type designer (which of course is the entire purpose of hinting).
It also depends greatly on the typeface you're using -- perhaps a simple face like Helvetica will appear to display just fine at 8 pts anti-aliased, but using an unhinted script face at that size will be a blur.
AA is most definitely *a* solution for Linux on the desktop. In fact it is an essential solution without any substitute. It is not the only display related feature that has needed improvement on the Linux desktop. But at last we are putting lack of AA behind us.
I agree completely -- at this point it isn't possible for a consumer OS to look "professional" without antialiasing ability, since the Mac and Windows have had it for several years now and people have gotten used to the quality of type on those platforms.
Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway.
Truetype is in every way a superior type technology to Postscript Type 1 (which should be no surprise as it is a decade younger). Miscorost's core collection of TrueType fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, etc) are quite possibly the most well-built fonts in existence.
The only reason we hold Type 1 & Type 3 fonts in such high regard is because such a vast library of high-quality fonts are already in existence that take full advantage of the limited hinting available in PS. Most TT fonts, though, have no manual hinting at all, so they look like crap compared to the PS versions.
Now that OpenType is catching on, we're starting to see really beautiful fonts taking advantage of the extra abilities TT always had but no one took advantage of (but MS).
But it is completely mistaking the nature of the problem to say that "hinting is important and Anti-aliasing is not at all important, and worse, it is a bad thing".
Well, full-time brute-force antialiasing CAN be a bad thing, compared to actually building the font right. It's a great boon for larger type sizes but not the solution for small type at all, and can very much hurt legibility. Both are necessary, and they solve different problems.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Actually, Xft has the little-known capability of doing subpixel sampling on LCD screens (which is what ClearType is).
To enable it you just have to set the X resource "Xft.rgba: rgb" though depending on the orientation of your LCD panel you may have to use "bgr" or "vrgb" or "vbgr" in place of "rgb".
Alternatively I think you can put
match edit rgba=bgr; (or rgb, or whatever)
in /etc/X11/Xftconfig