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Anti-Aliased Fonts For GNOME

Posted by timothy on from the smoothing-the-edges dept.

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!!"

2 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Computer AA vs. Hinting by mTor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some people simply don't get the point. It is very easy to create anti-aliased fonts but the truth is that they don't look that good. They're simply too blurred and 10 and 12pt fonts simply look like crap (as this screenshot attests to that).

    The reason why Microsoft's fonts look so good is because they are hinted and hand-tuned by humans. This is a painstakingly long process but it produces the best looking fonts. Linux is still lacking a copyright-free font set which looks good. Lots of people run the TT font server and use MS fonts because they are simply top-notch. Hinted fonts are essential when it comes to displaying fonts on the computer screen since reproducing quality and readable outlines on a low frequency, discrete grid is not easy.

    Linux community needs to produce a quality set of serif and non-serif hinted fonts. Only then will Linux desktop look as good as MS Windows one.

    AA is a step in the right direction but it is not a solution.

    If you want to learn more about hinting, my I suggest this link: http://microsoft.com/typography/hinting/hinting.ht m?fname=%20&fsize=

  2. This IS a big deal. by mwillems · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am the CTO of a company trying (desperately) to switch some people to Linux (all our servers are already Linux boxen), and I think this *is* a big deal. Here's why.

    Linux on the desktop is missing, in this order:

    1. File Conversion
    2. OLE - "cut and paste"
    3. Apps ("Office")
    4. Proper font support
    5. Integration of user interface
    6. Speed/efficiency.
    7. Platform standards

    Now notice, I am not the bad guys.. My home LAN has 7 Linux machines and one Win box. I desperately want to switch my company to OSS as fast as I can. I am hitting the above roadblocks - for a while. I'm pretty confident withing a few years we can overcome all this.

    For now, though, IE on Windows looks a whole lot better than Konqueror/Netscape/Mozilla on KDE or Gnome, largely due to fonts. That's what my colleague the CFO notices - this is therefore a major announcement.

    Michael

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