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!!"

Comments

Does it work with all applications?

[damiam]

Does it work with all applications? I saw a patch for AA text in GTK1.2 a few months ago that worked in most apps but crashed XMMS and a few others.

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[JanneM]

Apparently it will by default disable antialiasing for widgets that can't handle it. Don't know if xmms will be OK, though.

/Janne

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[kilrogg]

This works fine with Xmms. It took me a whole 2 minutes to download, install (there's a .rpm) and figure out that I had to select the proper theme. Looks perty sweet(better than the screenshot), but it doesn't appear to affect all fonts in gtk programs.

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[kilrogg]

Oh, and a link To the program.

what's up with this: "Your comment violated the poster comment compression filter. Comment aborted"

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[damiam]

what's up with this: "Your comment violated the poster comment compression filter. Comment aborted"

This is offtopic, but one of the lameness filters compresses your comment with gzip and notes the size difference - if it doesn't compress well, it's assumed not to be English (ie ASCII art or something like that).

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[YellowBook]

I saw a patch for AA text in GTK1.2 a few months ago that worked in most apps but crashed XMMS and a few others.

It looks like this is pretty much the same patch, but instead of directly applying it to GTK, it's built into a separate shared library that you load with LD_PRELOAD. This should let you enable and disable antialiasing on an app-by-app basis (using a little tiny bit of scripting in the background). I'd enable it globally, and then wrap scripts around problem apps to keep them from crashing.

Re:Does it work with all applications?

[ethereal]

Isn't that backwards? ASCII art should compress better than English, since it usually contains long rows of spaces, '=', etc.

FWIW, the ASCII art filter seems to be pretty easy to work around; I've seen plenty of those trolls in the last couple weeks.

This is great!

[James Skarzinskas]

Just the little things adding up, such as this, will make open-source alternatives such as GNOME rise above Windows.. Muahahah!

Re:This is great!

[vrmlknight]

This isn't meant as a troll but does it greatly increases mem and processor usage so everything runs slowly i had that problem w/ gnome and anti aliasing fonts on a 500mHz w/ 128 ram so what use is it for average users not everyone has a 1.2 athlon w/ 512 ram... yea its good to offer but is it fast???

Re:This is great!

[James Skarzinskas]

Good point; the more "little features" they add, the less of a low-end available platform it becomes for those who want to use a graphical environment.

Re:This is great!

[be-fan]

Not really. Win2K has an ass-load of features, but it runs great on my PII-300 /w 256MB of RAM. I think its just that MS is willing to make some concessions in idealized architecture for the sake of performance. COM, for example, isn't as well suited as CORBA for remote interfacing. That's why DCOM was hacked in. However, most uses of objects is local, so COM makes a lot more sense. GNOME CORBA architecture might be more "pure" but MS's performs better for 99% of people's uses.

This is just what we need

[Loudergood]

My only complaint left with Gnome is the clunky nautilus, now that it's a tad easier on my eyes.

Re:This is just what we need

[JanneM]

I never used gmc (or mc, for that matter), I've only tried Nautilus to see how it works, and the same goes for every other filemanager I've tried under Linux. In Linux, I prefer using shellcommands rather that dragn'drop. It's not becuse Linux filemanagers are bad - they aren't.

The weird thing is that under Win or NT, I have little problems with using their filemanager, and under MacOS, I'd feel lost without having directory windows everywhere. When I tried a program that gave me the same interface on Linux, I lost all patience within five minutes.

I think it's something about how you think about your system. I see Linux differently than I see MacOS (or Windows...), so my preferred work habits are different too. I saw the same thing happen with a friend who's a long time Mac developer when he started using Linux. After a while, he went more and more to using a shell instead of a filemanager (though he still mixes those uses after almost a year).

/Janne

Re:This is just what we need

[Loudergood]

true true...I've picked up a lot of bad habits since I left good ol DOS behind

Re:This is just what we need

[Jace of Fuse!]

It's not becuse Linux filemanagers are bad - they aren't.

I don't guess they are really all that bad, but I've yet to find one I can tolerate.

under Win or NT, I have little problems with using their filemanager

Me too, I disable all of the buttons, address bars, and other crap (turn off file hiding and extensions... it becomes usable!)

MacOS, I'd feel lost without having directory windows everywhere.

The MacOS does things well too. So did/does the Amiga. In fact, my favorite still today is the "Bland Old Amiga" file management system. It was very simple, yet powerful. Some people thought it was too simple, so along came many tools to spruce it up. Of course, they were OPTIONAL, the way features should be.

I think it's something about how you think about your system.

I tend to agree. 9 out of 10 times I use my BSD machine over a telnet connection. It sits on the other side of the room. The monitor is almost always off, the keyboard is a POS, and the mouse sucks. BUT, I do use it, and frequently. I just tend to use shells most of the time. I hate KDE. I hate Gnome. I hate X. Loath them, even. If they weren't both so emmensely popular with Linux users, I'd say the Unix world had a better chance of a "new killer underdog" popping up out of no-where and totally replacing X, since that's normally the way the computer industry works. But with the attitude of users today, esspecially current day Linux users, a really radical new desktop system for Unix would get flamed down and kicked under in much the same way Microsoft handles their competition: Without mercy.

Re:This is just what we need

[gol64738]

the reason you 'accept' the filemanager in windows is because you don't have a choice.

once you've used BASh in linux, how can you possibly use DOS??

Re:This is just what we need

[sfe_software]

I agree, I've never liked any graphical file manager as much as a text-based one. Personally I do most of my work via SSH using Midnight Commander.

Too many times in Windows I've accidentally drag 'n' dropped a file/directory and didn't realize it until much later... I don't need that on my *nix boxes as well. Midnight Commander is really powerful for that in my opinion.

As for anti-aliasing, it's probably very nice and all, but under Windows I've pretty much come to expect that as "normal". Under .+n[ui]x I haven't tried it yet (I use KDE more than Gnome, but still haven't tried any anti-aliasing). I'm sure it'd make web surfing a little easier on the eyes though...

Of course, given a high resolution and sub-optimal eye sight, one doesn't need anti-aliasing...

Re:This is just what we need

[hereticmessiah]

>> MacOS, I'd feel lost without having directory
>> windows everywhere.
>
> The MacOS does things well too. So did/does the
> Amiga. In fact, my favorite still today is
> the "Bland Old Amiga" file management system.
> It was very simple, yet powerful.

RISC OS does it similarly too. I still resort to using the directory viewer in Windows before using Windows Explorer when I'm using W2K.

The really sweet thing about the way RISC OS did it was that you had all your drives on the Iconbar - everything was just a click away. Combined with drag and drop saving, it was a dream to use.

Re:This is just what we need

[utoddl]

> once you've used BASh in linux, how can you possibly use DOS??

Once you've used BASh in DOS, how can you possibly use DOS?? I had the pleasure of taking a Java course where they had a bunch of laptops running (what else?) Windows, but they gave us BASh shells. It was great!

And of course, the fonts were anti-aliased. (See, even on topic!)

great.

[garcia]

freshmeat is even getting the jump on /.

I saw this yesterday on fm.net and decided that it really wasn't worth the time to dl/install/fuck with it.

if it is so great I am sure that it will be at some point included in the GNOME base. Until that time I will remain anti anti-aliased ;)

thanks for the info though.

Re:great.

[Publicus]

Good call. I just tried it and found out the hard way that it doesn't work well with the Ximian stuff. Now Evolution doesn't look right - so I removed the package aaf package - and Evolution is going really slow. I'd suggest that people hold off on this one, and as the man says, wait until it's part of the base. Unless of course you like to screw around with stuff, then go for it!

Re:great.

[Squid]

worth the time to dl/install/fuck with it.

It must be time to go to bed, I read this and thought "dl/install/fuck" was some kind of search/replace.

I'm not impressed

[rgmoore]

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.

Re:I'm not impressed

[1010011010]

Actually, you can get A.A. in other themes; just chose a "custom font" that's scalable in the Theme Selector.

Re:I'm not impressed

[kilrogg]

I doesn't appear to work for me with any of the MS TTF (monotype) or the adobe fonts. The abisource and urw fonts are anti-aliased however.

Are the abisource fonts truetypes?

Re:I'm not impressed

[Tomun]

read the long installation instructions in the help file, then create an empty ~/.gdkxft.
You now have all of your fonts antialiased.

Re:I'm not impressed

[unny]

Tried it out yesterday (yes, you can use it with your current GTK theme) -- and an interesting achievement as it is, i couldn't see any benefit. Really. Everything just looks fuzzy. The take-home message? By correctly configuring your (standard) XF86 font subsystem you CAN achieve a very pleasing impression. Check the font feuglification HOWTO next to you.

Re:I'm not impressed

[nullity]

Can you explain to me which fonts aren't in widgets? Pretty much every piece of text you see in the screen, from the text in your mailreader to the text in your web browser (though, due to evil hackery, this patch doesn't work on Mozilla) is in a widget. Get a clue dude. With regards to improvement...I notice a pretty big difference at 1600x1200. I suppose it all depends how picky you are about your text.

If you want to see shots of it in action...see

http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/

Every major operating system has already done this for years. This is serious catchup.

-seth

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[Bodero]

I've heard this term before but could never find out what it meant, what is anti-aliasing and why would I want it?

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.

Taking care of all the trolls early

[big.ears]

No need to post any of the following comments, as I will take care of them for you:

"Big deal. KDE has had AA since ..."

"So what? OS X has had AA since ..."

"This is news? Windows has had AA since ..."

Unfortunately, I still don't have AA fonts, because I'm running debian and the alianized .deb I created didn't appear to do anything.

Re:Taking care of all the trolls early

[damiam]

Unfortunately, I still don't have AA fonts, because I'm running debian and the alianized .deb I created didn't appear to do anything.

I'm also running Debian (potato + Ximian) and I installed gdkxft from source. It isn't working for me either. Maybe there's some issue with the GTK packages for Debian or something.

Re:Taking care of all the trolls early

[bagel]

I use Debian KDE (potato+woody). Supposedly KDE and QT is compiled with antialiased fonts. And X has AA as well. But whenever I run a KDE app, I get

Xlib: extension "RENDER" missing on display ":0.0"
And supposedly I only need to add the environment variable QT_XFT to 1 or TURE. Never works. Maybe you guys have better luck with the deb and gnome combination.

Re:Taking care of all the trolls early

[hattig]

Sounds like you have an ATI graphics card. AA is only supported with ATI graphics cards from XFree86 4.1 and above. I have wonderful anti-aliased fonts with KDE on 4.0.3 on FreeBSD at home (Voodoo 4500), but at work with the same setup, I don't (ATI Mach 64 naffness).

Does anyone know if the GTK anti-aliasing uses the X11 RENDER extension, or if it does it all itself in some horrific Macrosoftian bloat copy?

Also, anti-aliased fonts should be made to just work on Linux/FreeBSD/KDE/Gnome. Better fonts management tools are required (MacOS/Windows has this kind of stuff down to a tee, and the Amiga had this all done 10 years ago with its font installers), not any of this mkfontdir, mkttfontdir and all that malarky. I think that in a year's time, Linux will be truly ready for the desktop. We need a full screen XDM/GDM/KDM that looks sexy for multiple users (with their photos and all that stuff), no text based boot up (user defined picture instead), and KDE/Gnome/etc friendlyness (when I install a Gnome app via RPM/DEB I want it to show up in the correct menu on my KDE desktop, with the proper icon, etc).

Still, things are getting there. Now just to rename /usr, /sbin, /tmp, /var, etc to meaningful names... :)

Re:Taking care of all the trolls early

[ethereal]

Here's an unlikely comment that I think of every time I see a posting about AA - does anyone else think the whole font issue way overblown? I don't see much difference between Windows and Linux fonts. Maybe I'm just not the artsy, graphical type, but the eye strain that everyone else has when reading using standard Linux/X fonts doesn't seem to affect me at all. I just don't see what the big deal is.

I will admit that Mac OS X is somewhat prettier than Linux or Windows, but I really think it's more the alpha-channel transparency more than the AA fonts. Or is one implemented through the other?

Maybe this is the engineering viewpoint, but I just can't see business/desktop users caring about what the fonts look like. As long as you can read them, shut up and get back to work. I can't even imagine complaining to my boss at work that my computer's display isn't pretty enough, and thus I won't be able to use this new Linux desktop, etc., etc. IMHO fonts would be about the last thing that I would think of as "holding Linux back".

Then again, as is shortly to be proven below, it could be that I'm the only one that feels this way :) I mean, I can see that the letters look different in some cases, but I just don't see why anyone would care so damn much about it...

what about KDE

[Arctic Fox]

Hasn't KDE had this for quite some time?
</flamebait>
But this is still cool.... I remember when I got KDE and Anti-Alias fonts on my desktop with Mandrake 8.0.... it looked "too good"... almost made my eyes hurt. Anyone know why that would happen, or have experienced it?

Re:what about KDE

[omega9]

I agree. It hard to explain that "too good" good look. Sometimes, I swear I can even see colors inside AA white text. There are some AA fonts in KDE that make me feel like I supposed to be wearing glasses, I'm just not at the time.

Re:what about KDE

[Darren Winsper]

Oh please. RISC OS 2, released in 1989, had better AA than Windows. Check out http://www.riscos.com/risc_os_4/Features.html for shots of its AA in action.

Re:what about KDE

[spauldo]

Try programming on a commodore 64 sometime. If you set your background to black and text to white, everything's all rainbowish. 'course that's due to using TV resolution, not a fault in the video.

It'd be nice if they had a way to kill the "rainbowish" look of CRT screens. Even my 20" HP monitor does it to some extent at 1600x1200. I've not played with LCD much, it bein' too expensive, so i dunno if it fixes the problem or not.

Re:what about KDE

[bLitzfeuer]

There are some AA fonts in KDE that make me feel like I supposed to be wearing glasses, I'm just not at the time.

100% anti-aliasing on your screen is probably the ailment. If you have anti-aliasing on smaller fonts your eyes will strain trying to "focus" on the text. You might want to look into configuring Xft (the library rendering the type) to not anti-alias text within a certain size threshold. Documentation is here

Re:what about KDE

[omega9]

This is what it's all about. I greatly appreciate that link, I have bookmarked it for later. Right now there's a Godzilla movie on SciFi :)

Just crashed gnome for me.

[Grock]

I just installed it..and all I get is a big ole
gnome core file in my home directory. Fortunately, it uninstalls (rpm --erase ...) fine,
and I'm back to running again..

Only for widgets?

[aussersterne]

Being one who likes to try new things and who already uses fully AA KDE as my desktop, I thought it would be a good thing to download this and try it out.

But it only seems to anti-alias the text on buttons and in menus, not in text input or output panes!? So basically, it anti-aliases the parts of your applications that you look at least.

Not quite what I was hoping for...

Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[simetra]

IMHO, Fonts are a royal pain, and the main reason more people don't adopt Linux. If they could just build true type fonts and anti-aliasing into KDE, and make it work out of the box, then we'd start seeing way more converts.
Really, until recently, no matter how well I got X running, it still looked like crap. It's looking better now that I've got KDE working with ttfs and anti-aliasing, but it's a LONG way from being user friendly.
My 2 cents.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[Glytch]

IMHO, Fonts are a royal pain, and the main reason more people don't adopt Linux.

Wow! And for all this time I thought it was silly little things like hardware support or getting companies to write applications for it or getting installation to be fast and painless or some tiny little concerns like that.

All this time it was the fonts! My god, you're a genius! I wish I was as insightful as you!

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[quartz]

What? I got AA fonts after "rpm -Uvh kde*" with KDE 2.2. I don't know about other distros, but with Redhat you can't get more "out of the box" than that. There's also a checkbox in the KDE "Fonts" control panel if you want to disable AA.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[isdnip]

Fonts are a huge problem!

Out of the box, Linux usually looks lousy. At least it did for my last few installs, including Mandrake 7.1 and 7.2 and RedHat 8.0. The font rendering was plug-ugly, compared to Windoze. Indeed it was barely readable, especially in Netscape.

Now the main problem, of course, was that the profoundly defective AbiSuite fonts were installed in the font path. (Why do Linux distributions still do this?) Thanks to Google Groups, I found out about it and could remove the offending line. After that, the fonts were merely mediocre, maybe as good as Windows 3.0, though it's hard to compare the monitors of those days to now.

After a session of Linux, rebooting to Windows is a treat to the eyes. Not that Windows is better than Linux for everything, but XFree86 seems to have terribly primitive font rendering, while Windows pays close attention to appearances. I do typically insert Windows fonts into Linux, which are better than the usual X fonts, but Linux has still not got the best font rendering engines. It makes a real difference in readability when looking at the small fonts some web sites use.

The X Window System was a clever invention for its day, the early 1980s and Project Athena, where the goal was a "1-1-1" X server (display terminal) system (1 M byte RAM, 1 M pixel screen, 1 MHz CPU). But Linux would benefit from a modern replacement. (What ever happened to Hungry's "Y"?)

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[simetra]

Yes. I am a genius.
Also, you could make a Linux 100% compatible with all hardware ever made, give it Microsoft Office, make it bone-head easy to install, etc., but if the end result isn't as clean and pretty as Windows, nobody will use it.
The current KDE I'm using, with True Type fonts and anti-aliasing looks very good, but my main point was that achieving this wasn't a process a normal end user would enjoy, or even attempt. There's not a "Make fonts pretty" button. I'm willing to bet most end users don't know what fonts are anyway (but know something's wrong when they're ugly).
As much as I dislike MS, I have to admit that anyone over the age of 3 should be able to install Windows and end up with a relatively pretty GUI.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[Kalani]

What sort of free programming work are you doing for Linux?

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[Glytch]

I don't understand this obession with fonts that some people have. Fonts are a minor concern, except to hardcore graphic designers. Give Linux near-total hardware support and racks full of working-out-of-the-box software at the local Staples or Best Buy, and people will use it.

Every time I discuss Linux with a non-Linux user, they ask about hardware and software. They don't ask the bloody fonts.

Ugly text in X? I've tried KDE 2.2, both with and without anti-aliased fonts, and I can't tell the difference. To me, X looks no better with anti-aliasing. Or are you going to blame my monitor resolution (1280x1024x32 on a 17", a typical user's setup) or my eyesight (20/17, better than normal), or are you just going to attack my lack of aesthetic sensiblities?

Come on, I want a link to studies demonstrating that normal users can (A) tell the difference and (B) care about the difference. Can you prove your assertions?

(Ah, I love the smell of a flamewar in the morning... ^_^)

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[quartz]

You don't really have much of a long-term memory, do you? Either that, or you're really really young. I remember a time when every single motherfscking computer user out there knew how to work with the command line, because that was all there was. IBM PCs running DOS. And they all did it. Nobody thought it was difficult or anything. They just fscking did it. That was less than 10 years ago. Now how the heck did everyone suddenly go so mindbogglingly stupid during those few years, that we're now expected to design our hardware and software for retards? How the hell did that happen? Because, frankly, I don't want to work with software designed for retards. I expect the software I work with to respect my intellect and my ability to make full use of a complex tool, NOT dumb down the capabilities of the tool because I might have a problem understanding more than pretty pictures and buttons.

Oh well. I guess that's why I use Linux and not Windows. You know what? Screw the "stupid cows". Who the hell feels the urge to cater to THEM anyway, besides proprietary software makers like Microsoft who have a lot of $$$ to gain from it? I sure don't. Why is everyone here so hung up on the idea that Linux should be brought to the "general public"? What do YOU have to gain if Linux gets dumbed down to the point of being usable by people with the IQ of cows?

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[simetra]

The thing is, every moron with a credit card has a computer now, whereas they didn't 10 or so years ago. Yes, the average computer user today is a retard. As much as we say fonts really don't matter, it does for them. Many people think Linux should become more friendly to the masses. I say this won't happen until it is mind-numbingly easy for the average user to set it up nice and pretty without having to think.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[be-fan]

Ugly text in X? I've tried KDE 2.2, both with and without anti-aliased fonts, and I can't tell the difference. To me, X looks no better with anti-aliasing. Or are you going to blame my monitor resolution (1280x1024x32 on a 17", a typical user's setup) or my eyesight (20/17, better than normal), or are you just going to attack my lack of aesthetic sensiblities?
>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, eyesight has nothing to do with it. My eyes are pretty bad, and I really can tell the difference between MS's good fonts and QNX's even better ones. Its a subjective thing. Many people with perfect hearing can't tell the difference between crappy speakers and good speakers. Same thing with monitors. Some people are just more sensetive to these details than others.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[be-fan]

Honestly, people are able to use command lines. Ten years ago, Windows wasn't common at all. Yet, businesses all over the country used DOS programs without any problems. These weren't technologically elite people, they were just business users who have been doing the same word-processing tasks for the last century. They shifted from doing it by hand, to typewriter, to primitive PC machines, to primitive GUIs, all the way to Office XP. People haven't gotten dumber since then, the software industry's perception of them has.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[nEoN nOoDlE]

So how can I get this ttfs thing running? Anyone have some howtos on where to get it and how to install it?

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[shandrew]

IMHO, Fonts are a royal pain, and the main reason more people don't adopt Linux. If they could just build true type fonts and anti-aliasing into KDE, and make it work out of the box, then we'd start seeing way more converts.

Debian woody will do it easily. Just set QT_XFT to "true". For a web browser, use the dynamically linked version of Opera.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[Ray Dassen]

(What ever happened to Hungry's "Y"?)

Y appears to be quite dead. The only X replacement I've recently seen activity of is Berlin for which Debian packages are now available.

Re:Fonts: main Linux hindrance

[mrfiddlehead]

I've not had these problems in the least since the Font Deuglification HOWTO appeared on the scene. See the
FDU for details.

Good news.

[omega9]

This is nothing but good news. Even smallish changes like AA fonts help in the long run.

Previous posters are content on slamming it because KDE has been doing AA for some time, and Win95+Plus even longer. So Gnome should just give up? Would you rather have AA in Gnome or not? If the answer is yes, don't bitch about the timing. You got it, now shut up.

Personaly, I leave AA fonts in KDE turned off at work. For some reason it actually makes certain things harder to read (probably the monitor). And honestly, I've never been able to tell that much difference in Windows when it is on.

I fail to see what there is to complain about.

Re:Good news.

[omega9]

Yes, actually. Gnome was (barely) useful at one time

Gnome used to be my desktop of choice. Since the release of KDE 2.x I have used KDE exclusively. I don't think I'd go so far as to say it was barely useful. And I don't think how useful it was or wasn't has anythink to do with any toolkit it uses. A menu is useful because it is well designed, not because it does/doesn't use QT.

Tighter, less crashes, better-looking... why stick with crap? Loyalty? Stubbornness? Inability to admit that you were - *gasp* - wrong?

I don't think it's a matter of admiting you're wrong, I think it's a matter of knowing when you're the one that should admit it (using "you" figuratively). Linux users are definitely in the minority, and as such we tend to become so involved in the uphill battle that we...

Linux/*BSD would be better served if the egos would just be dropped

...dropped our egos. We have so many battles to fight that we become complacent and start spitting canned responses when poked or proded. Before XP is even out we're allready passing judgement on it. I've had XP Pro RC2 installed on a machine in our NOC for a few weeks now, and I have to admit there are things I like about it. This doesn't mean I don't have issues with Microsoft, it's purely the technology I'm evaluating. Sometimes I feel like the /. crowd has such a hard time moving past the Microsoft name, they wouldn't recognize a truely inovative feature from them if it bit them on the ass. If you expect people to admit their wrong, ask how easy it would be to admit you're wrong.

Re:Good news.

[Guignol]

Sorry for the Offtopic but this is interesting :)
(not my reply, the above comments)

I definitely agree with you, although I tend to agree with your parent too. (though I wouldn't be that drastic).
I think that what is needed in fact (I've been thinking about it since a while, but I can't find a way to start it correctly, the basic concepts aren't easy to formulate). Is an abstract library. I don't mean a compatible library, that would let you code for gtk or qt with generic widgets that could then be implmentted as qt or gtk widgets, but an indeed abstract library.
The idea is, you just code the data processing part. Not the GUI, in fact, nothing about the GUI.
So you would define some "user interaction things" (couldn't find a suitable name) where you describe a need for input or output of predefined datatypes and provide and modify according to events an application interface (as in oo interface). (datatypes would be defined in a MIME fashion). you would provide some hook-like functions to deal with input, and would generate event-like signals to deal with output.
when running your application, the lib would take care of finding out what is your current environment (text/gnome/kde/etc), what are the system preferences and your personal preferences. and would generate a GUI on the fly.
A completely automatic gui generation would probably be pretty uggly, but the preferences should (although running well without it) find a hihger level description of the application GUI.
(an xml-like description of it like glade ones for ex.) but it would also dynamically look for the most suitable widgets provided to build the app. that is:
the app (cocobobo) asks for a name. If we have a cocobobo widget, then this is all we need to create the whole app. (looks like someone liked this app and made a whole widget just for it). If not, it will look for a Name provider, as name is also a string, if there is no name provider on the system, it will look for a string provider etc..
This should let people focus on their priorities.
right now, good applications are not considered because of bad gui design etc etc. also, it could let you work on your app without worrying about wether to do it for gnome or kde or anything else.
oh well..

$chown us base
wouldn't that be
#chown us base ?
or even
#chown us base* ? :)

Computer AA vs. Hinting

[mTor]

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=

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[debrain]

Interestingly, I find that the staroffice fonts are top-knotch. It's too bad that they're not part of the regular distributions, since I use them quite a bit, especially arioso and other esoteric fonts which are very pleasing to the eye, but not cookie-cutter. AA makes all the difference in the world for these fonts in KDE, especially arioso in kmail.

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.

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[Sergej]

To make Free fonts one needs Free tools to make them, unless you can pay for a commercial font type editor.

There's some future in PfaEdit which is somewhat Free though...

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[update()]

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.

This would be a great thing to lobby for, before the investment in the Linux desktop dries up completely: that someone with deep pockets (IBM, Gnome Foundation, the remnants of VA) would buy or underwrite development for some good, freely-licensed, anti-aliasable fonts.

It's not the kind of thing a talented CS sophomore is going to bang out.

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[TandyMasterControl]

You are speaking in generalities, and confusing your limited experience for a universal principle.
On your moinitor, maybe, AA fonts look blurry. On any monitor with a deccently high resolution, = &lt .26mm pixel height for example, they are a godsend. Hell, they are even a godsend on almost any decent TFT, especially using rgb for subpixel rendering instead of grays. The better your monitor the more AA fonts resemble good quality printing on paper. Even in small point sizes.

And I will do some generalization myself: the better the fonts look in many applications, such as word processors like OpenOffice which now automatically uses AA if available, and document layout programs like Quark Xpress, the more confident and comfortable most people feel about using those applications. The resemblance to printed output removes the need to imagine the look of the final document while working on it. Now that AA has been standard for so long on those platforms where such applications are most used, few of the typesetters, office workers, and none of the designers would ever consider a platform without this ability as minimally acceptable.

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.

Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway. 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".

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[prizog]

It is not somewhat Free, it is truly Free. Their license is listed among the Free Software Foundations license list. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[NMerriam]

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.

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[FunkyChild]

Miscorost's core collection of TrueType fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, etc) are quite possibly the most well-built fonts in existence.

Well built for screen, that is. Even though they look very similar, just about any designer will choose Helvetica over Arial. The proportions and spacing are subtly, yet not insignificantly more even and easy on the eye. Of course Arial is an MS knock-off of Helvetica, so that's to be expected.

I totally agree about the hinting though.

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[HiThere]

Is there any decent software for designing fonts? I designed a couple of decent (special purpose) fonts on the Mac using Fontographer, and tried to design one using ResEdit. I won't ever try again without a decent Font editor program. The ResEdit version just wasn't suitable. The Fontographer version was. I don't know the details involved, but it seems to me that Kontour Bezier curves have solved most of the difficulty already. It just needs someone who understands how font-hinting works to adapt it as a font edit program.

I do know that in the early versions of Fontographer one of the steps involved generating bit-maps from the fonts at various sizes which were then hand tuned. It was a lot of work, but with the existence of this kind of program, a large number of fonts came into existence. True, most of them weren't very useful... I created a custom font called Eerier (based on a bit-map font called Eire), and another custom old english kind of font, based on another font, but with the letters modified to be more readable. Other people did graphics, music, whatever struck their fancy.

But the first step was the editor. Until that happened... nothing.

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[Performer Guy]

You're both right, ignore the flamefesters. AA is important it is misleading to say only hinting is needed. Hinting helps improve the frequency response, particularly on vertical and horizontal edges even with AA, Nyquist states that you can only reconstruct information at half the frequency of screen samples. Hinting lets you cheat by aligning edges to the grid when you antialias(it's really a nasty hack but it works), but AA is still very important. Hinting without AA stops things looking horribly distorted, hinting WITH AA improves the frequency response and avoids blurry edges on vertical and horizontal features. Can't we all just get along?

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[NMerriam]

Well built for screen, that is. Even though they look very similar, just about any designer will choose Helvetica over Arial

They are well-built and well-designed. But they were designed for screen use, and because of that they aren't necessarily pleasing designs for print. But their construction and technical superiority to even the best Adobe/Bitstream/Monotype Helvetica is undeniable. Design is a separate issue from technical construction, and the MS faces are as well-designed for their use as any print face is for print.

And it's worth noting that EVERY Helvetica is a knock-off of Helvetica :)

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[inkswamp]

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).

I guess that depends entirely on what platform you're using. I can speak from my own experience that the anti-alias effect offered by Apple in the Mac OS is exquisitely good. Anti-aliasing is not simply blurring (i.e. straight lines when anti-aliased correctly should show less signs of anti-aliasing that curves. Inner parts of curves should anti-alias differently than the outer parts.) When done properly, it makes on-screen text far more legible. I hate to work on any of my Macs at home or work without it now.

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.

That may be true of MS. I'd believe it. I have a Windows PC at work and a lot of times, the anti-aliasing effect seems really clunky and poorly done (yeah, I know... hard to believe MS would do something half-assed!) That becomes more evident when I'm viewing a non-MS font or looking at a font not typically used. However, once again, the anti-aliasing on the Mac is done in such a way that I have yet to see a font that looks bad.

I'm not trying to sound like a typical Mac user, hyping up my OS of choice. I'm just saying that I wouldn't write off the value of anti-aliasing on-screen text until you've seen it done properly. It really is easier on your eyes when it's done just right.

--Rick

Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting

[prizog]

Nobody controls the meaning of the term free, but nobody would disagree that a license being on the Free Software License list is a sufficient, but not necessary condition of being a Free license.

Even Microsoft would call the X11-like license which PfaEdit is released under a Free license.

What more could you want?

Now, about my .sig: Copyright is government-sanctioned theft from the commons of thought. An idea cannot be stolen by being copied, since every user of the idea still has it. An idea can only be stolen by being locked up, so that some people cannot use the idea. Maybe I should change it to be "Intellectual Property Is Theft", but I don't like that term, for obvious reasons. (Also, trademarks, so long as they are not abused, are not theft, since duplicating them can diminish reputation)

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[znu]

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?

graphics compare to the mac

[mark_lybarger]

so now i can FINALLY make graphics on my pc that will compete with the mac? :)

Well spoken...

[root_42]

...and thus the best combination is to use the freely on the web available Microsoft fonts (on their ftp site e.g.) and disable font antialiasing for font sizes in the range from 8 to 14 pt. Very small fonts look better with AA and very large ones.
And here is what your /usr/lib/X11/XftConfig should contain:

match
any size > 8
any size < 14
edit
antialias = false;

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.

Re:Well spoken...

[SLi]

Very small fonts look better with AA and very large ones.

I've never quite understood this. I wouldn't probably care much about very large fonts not being antialiased as long as the 8-14 pt ones are :-)

Re:Well spoken...

[The Pim]

disable font antialiasing for font sizes in the range from 8 to 14 pt.

This is exactly right for text widgets and such, but may be a problem for programs that do more sophisticated text layout. If glyphs do not fall on pixel boundaries, anti-aliasing can be a huge win, because forcing glyphs to pixel boundaries can completely screw up glyph spacing. For example, try running xpdf on most any PDF document, in non-anti-aliasing mode.

Does X anti-aliasing have any support for disabling anti-aliasing for "widget text" but enabling it for "WYSIWYG text"? Can programs that need WYSIWYG at least override the default? Italicized, rotated, and magnified text have similar issues. It's not just about point size.

Re:Well spoken...

[richie123]

An improvement on the settings above is to use set up only fonts that look best without aa.

As an example:

match
any family = "Times New Roman"
weight = medium
any size > 7
any size 14
edit
antialias = false;

causes on times new roman to only be anti-aliased
above and below 7 and 14 points. In my experience all sans-serif fonts look best with aa at all sizes, while some serif fonts look better without aa when unbolded.

Repeat the setting above for each font where you only want aa at certain sizes.

go to http://dot.kde.org/989808269/ for more info.

Yeah, I guess so

[Reality Master 101]

Is anyone actually proud of this ugly hack? Call me crazy, but antialising should be supported at the font rendering level, not at the application (or app toolkit) level.

Can someone *please* come up with a spec for overhauling font management in X? Overhauling X in general? Just steal display PDF from Apple/Adobe?

Something??? This is unbelievably crude, and the OSS community should be embarrased.

Re:Yeah, I guess so

[sesquiped]

Why in the world should the OSS community be embarrassed at limitations of a display system and protocol that they didn't create? I'd suggest go learning a bit about the history of X Windows and the X Consortium before you start criticizing whole communities for things they are entirely not responsible for.

Re:Yeah, I guess so

[Angst Badger]

Something??? This is unbelievably crude, and the OSS community should be embarrased.

I reluctantly have to agree. Linux is great for a number of different tasks, but anything related to graphic design and desktop publishing is so much better served by Windows and MacOS applications that anyone suggesting Linux for these tasks ought to be laughed out of the room for being the clueless nutball that they are. It is endlessly frustrating to me that I have to keep Windows around to have a full-featured word processor and page layout software, but that's just how it is right now.

I think most Linux users recognize this as an unfortunate fact of life, and it's a natural consequence of the dominant interests of the average Linux user (myself included). Unfortunately, there is a small faction consisting of people who have never used word processors or layout software extensively who think that WordPad clones like AbiWord are "good enough", and they probably are for those users. Likewise with the people who can seriously suggest that the GIMP is a workable replacement for Photoshop, which is a laughable notion for anything except web graphics. When newbies come to Linux, ask where the serious publishing apps are, and get pointed to the GIMP and StarOffice, you can hardly blame them for sticking with commercial apps.

A huge step in the right direction would be the sort of droolproof, unified handling of fonts one sees in Windows and MacOS, especially if TrueType and Type1 fonts were managed through the same interface. On-screen antialiasing at the X level is another must. That we should still be lacking for this sort of fundamental GUI feature in 2001 is a clear sign that someone -- I wish I knew who -- still doesn't get the distinction between programmer/users and application users.

Re:Yeah, I guess so

[Enahs]

Overhauling X in general? Just steal display PDF from Apple/Adobe?

You might check into Display Ghostscript (uh, dunno if it can handle Display PDF stuff...yet... :-) or you might just want to check into the X extension that the current QT, future GTK+, and this current theme/lib uses, which is Xrender.

Re:Yeah, I guess so

[Luyseyal]

Define "serious publishing apps".

At university, LaTeX is the serious publishing app in my department. Different strokes for different folks. CMYK support in GIMP is a huge deal. I don't envy any of the poor souls who are navigating all the patents on that.

But since we're speaking of publishing, a much larger problem than "lousy print support (you *can* do CMYK under Linux, but it's all done through ghostscript or gimp-print using printer-specific drivers, thus 'lousy' and not 'no')" is "no decent drawing program". We've got the photoshop, but not the Illustrator or Painter clone. I know about killustrator (or whatever it's called now), sketch, etc. but they are *much* further behind than GIMP. let's not even start on PageMaker and the rest.

X has supported server side extensions for a very long time. XRender is getting more and more usage daily. Why don't you get a better window manager and a newer copy of X?

Anti-aliasing is cheap in hardware these days, unlike when X was designed. But you have to look at the original philosophy of the design: network transparency. But I also question the philosophy that the display server knows better what to anti-alias than the client. How much overhead will client-specific messages about "do not AA this. do AA that" take up? Compared to VNC, X protocol is a speed daemon. I like it that way.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, just pointing out some things.

-l

Re:Yeah, I guess so

[haggar]

I would also add: musical software. Linux is badly lacking in that field. Let's see: sequencers: there's Jazz. That's it. And it ain't powerful enough for most of the musicians, me included. Then, let's see about sound recording and editing: nottin'. OK, so how about softsynths: Timidity. Development discontinued, but it wasn't worth the effort anyway. And how about analog-modeling softsynths? Not one. OK, is there any drum-machine for Linux? Not that I know of. How about synthesizer module editors? None.

I will be happy if I am proven wrong,but if the app you want to stick to me is a CLI based, most musicians won't use it. Not because they can't, but because it really kills your creative work. That wasn't the problem with Timidity, since that's just a wave sampling synth, (it uses tonebanks), and there's really very little you can do with that, as far as interaction goes.

So anytime I want to create some music, I boot into Windows or BeOS. BTW, you wold be surprised at the amount of good musical freeware, for BeOS. Considering it's a platform that has about 100 to 1000 TIMES less users than Linux. And probably 10.000 times less users than Windows.

easy way to make every computer app anti-aliased..

[kneel]

smear vaseline on your monitor. the text will appear just as blurry as if you were using 'font smoothing' under windows 98.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[wct]

The GTK anti-aliasing is still being handled by the FreeType engine, which is IMHO perceptively as good as it gets. But you're begging for the screenshots aren't you? Here are some tiny morsels for you :)

• Konqueror (and the rest of QT) has xft enabled for a while now - shot 1
• And here is the gdkxft working on the gnapster menu bar - similar results. shot 2

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[super-flex-o-matic]

the question is: why the apple anti-aliasing looks so cutting edge, and antialiasing in gimp for example is not usable for sizes of 12-9 pixels? this makes webdesigning ... a pain in the @ss. luckily i dont stick with mainstream design trends

Stop-gap measure

[wct]

I haven't seen it pointed out yet, but GDK/GTK 1.3 have had AA enabled for a while now, so this is very much an interim thing while we wait for the big gnome 2.0 release.

I've tried it out a bit and generally liked it. There are some problems with font sizes in certain applications, where the font is now larger than the widget, but then again this may be due to the changed font preferences required. It takes a bit of fudging the configurations in Debian, and make sure you have a symlink /etc/X11/XF86Config to your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 if you're running XF4.0, or the config script dies.

Holy shit, mac had anti aliased fonts in OS 8

[kiwipeso]

umm, that's since 1994

Re:Holy shit, mac had anti aliased fonts in OS 8

[Professor J Frink]

And RISC OS running on Acorns had it since about 1989 iirc (can't be arsed looking up the dates).

Anything you think is great has been done before countless times be people you've never heard of on systems you've never used. Such is the way of computers.

Maybe in the far future all systems will merge into the exact same looking, same performing, same stability product. Convergent evolution and all that.

What's the big deal?

[evilviper]

I really just don't see the point of anti-aliased fonts... Why the whole big concern over fonts that are slightly jagged. I'm perfectly happy with the normal fonts (although I wish there were more to choose from) and think they jook just fine.

Re:What's the big deal?

[be-fan]

Well, just because it's okay for you don't mean its okay for everyone. Some people are just more sensitive to things than others. I think that AA fonts (good implementations, at least) look noticibly better than non-AA ones.

For a great implementation of AA fonts, check out QNX's RtP. The Font Fusion powered Photon has the most god-damn gorgeous fonts in the entire universe. Download RtP just to take an eyeful of the fonts!

Re:What's the big deal?

[Webz]

Jagged indicates rough, and thats just one of many minute details that visual designers labor over. If you're talking about fonts on screen, as in the terminal, then fine, anti-aliased fonts aren't a big deal. But in a medium resolution environments, anti-aliased fonts will feel different from black and white bitmappy fonts.

Re:What's the big deal?

[evilviper]

I've installed and used QNX on more than one occasion. The OS is a waste of drove space and the fonts are certainly nothing to get excited over.

I wish more energy would be spent on projects that fill an hole (like dillo), rather than on trivial AA fonts, and things that could be 'just a little better'.

Re:What's the big deal?

[evilviper]

Well, I'm running X at 1024x768, and looking at /. through Netscape 4.08 with Helvetica font at 14pt on a 19" high-res monitor. The text in your post is very clear and easially readable. Certain letters have the very minute-est of fuzziness around their curves, but that certainly doesn't make it any less readable, or hard on the eyes. That little bit of fuzz absolutely disappears when fonts go to paper. On a 1200x1200 Laser printer, these fonts look just short of perfect. Now that's my take on things... Perhaps I'm missing something, or others are just in a worse situation, but I don't see what the big deal is about.

Re:What's the big deal?

[be-fan]

Well, your opinion about QNX's fonts are irrelevant, as we have already established that you are font-blind...

As for QNX, X can't hold a candle to Photon. Photon is smaller, faster, looks better, is easier to program, and has more features!

Re:What's the big deal?

[evilviper]

I can tell the fonts are smoother, but that makes little difference to the operation or ease of use of the system. The differences are minute at best. I think a far better use for a programmers time would be improving GTK+ rather than AA.

While Photon may be smaller and faster than X, the underlying OS is much slower than Linux/*BSD making that point moot. Of course I don't know that Photo is legitimately faster since I've never even attempted a side-by-side comparison of both on the same OS...

Timothy McVeigh

[Cyph]

Didn't anybody notice the humour in this:
Posted by timothy on Sun September 02, 16:04 from the smoothing-the-edges dept. McVeigh revels in this posting...

Re:Timothy McVeigh

[kubrick]

Yes, I was just about to post a message about this myself...

If that's what he calls smoothing the edges, I'd hate to see what he does when he gets angry!

(OK, I know, it's in poor taste...)

AA for medium sized fonts

[/ASCII]

I've seen at least 3 post claiming that for medium resolution fonts (~10..16 pts) AA sucks. Instead of replying to all of them, I'll post this one comment:

AA can, if overdone make medium sized fonts seem blury and hard to read. In the end, this is not a weakness in the idea of AA but in the implementation. For a good implementation of AA check out BeOS, medium sized fonts are (where) only slightly AA:ed, producing smooth but sharp-looking fonts. I belive this is done by using a single grayscale, and using a bias towards b/w. For very pretty but almost completely unreadable AA-fonts, check out MacOS.

Neither am I

[Platinum Dragon]

I didn't seem to notice any antialiasing either. Looking through the config files and gdkxft_sysinstall script seems to provide some answers.

During install, gdkxft_sysinstall tries to read Xft's font names using xftcache. Unfortunately, xftcache doesn't seem to exist in X 4.0.x for us poor Dead Hat people. For all I know, it may not be in X 4.0.x at all. It is, however, in X 4.1.0. Therefore, I'm not sure the gdkxft_sysinstall script can build a proper XftConfig file in XFree86 4.0.x. The answer's not as simple as installing 4.1.0 binaries out of RawHide; they're linked to a couple other libraries, which also are linked to other libraries... and it's just a mess.

If anyone can pull it off, I'd like to know. I sure would like to try antialiasing my fonts, since I tend to jack the size way up for visibility reasons. Otherwise, I may just have to upgrade to DeadHat 7.2 or Mandrake's next version. Or, I can build 4.1.0 myself. That may turn out to be the most viable option.

Re:Neither am I

[Syberghost]

Here's my experience with it:

Installed the RPM under RedHat 7.1.

init 3 / init 5, to make sure everything was cleared out and reloaded.

The gnome panel crashes every time it tries to run. I was panel-less.

rpm -e gdkxft; init 3; init 5

Everything works again.

Please fix something useful

[BoosterToad]

Antialiased fonts are nice, but I'd prefer if someone fixed of the existing broken parts of Gnome instead.

For example, fix the awkward text-selection mechanism in gnome-terminal. It's always half a character off compared to the "industry standard" way this should work. Go look at any Windows or Mac application and copy it's behavior.

Or, implement any of the changes suggested in Sun's recent Gnome usability study. Each of those things are far more important than antialiased fonts.

I appreciate the wonderful work that went into adding the antialiased fonts, but in the future, please concentrate more on fixing the crufty broken parts of Gnome rather than adding flashy new features. Thank you.

Drew Olbrich

Re:Please fix something useful

[quakeslut]

hey drew,

i had that problem with gnome-terminal too. it has something to do with how fast you make your selection. if you go too fast the terminal will take a split second to register your down click, and when it does you'll be 2 letters over from where you started, and then it will consider *that* your starting point... something weird like that. (try it, you'll see what i'm talking about)

either make your selections with slow, deliberate movements, or just switch to good ol' xterm like i did.

Re:Please fix something useful

[kilrogg]

For example, fix the awkward text-selection mechanism in gnome-terminal. It's always half a character off compared to the "industry standard" way this should work. Go look at any Windows or Mac application and copy it's behavior.

I had never noticed that, but it does appear that the regular xterm also works this way, so maybe this is just an old *nix convention. It could be worst though, text selection/pasting in Windows' command prompt window is unquestionably more awkward.

Re:Please fix something useful

[pavon]

Don't thrash on someone for contributing to free software just because it's not what you think is best for the movement.

The best area for a person to contribute to the open source comunity is the area that is the most interesting to them. Something strange happens when you are working on a project that is fun: you are actually motivated to work on it. You want to spend countless hours of your free time. You care about having a high quality peice of software.

And who cares if it benifits the community at large. If one other person in the world uses, learns, or borrows from the software that is more that enough. Releasing work under a free licence is a gift from the programmer not an obligation.

The things you mentioned are important, and some programmer will want to work on them, and that person will probably do a much better job simply because he wants to do these things.

Writing free software should be fun, and if we are starting to think of it as a chore than something is wrong.

Re:Please fix something useful

[mrfiddlehead]

And when selecting text in an EDIT control, widget, whatever, don't select the text into the clipboard automatically. This drives me nuts. Text should only be selected into the clipboard automatically in a read only widget.

Mozilla is broken in this respect too.

Re:Please fix something useful

[spitzak]

Actually GTK fixed this (I know, I copied their fix into the newest version of FLTK). They use two different "clipboards", the XA_CLIPBOARD (for Ctrl+C type actions) and XA_SELECTION (for the currently selected text). Unfortunately lots of toolkits (like older fltk...) would paste the XA_SELECTION instead of XA_CLIPBOARD when you typed ctrl+V. Until the other toolkits are fixed you will continue to see this.

Middle-mouse paste is actually a much more efficient form of "drag and drop". It has the advantage that you can rearrange the windows or even open new ones before you "drop" the text. So I really want to see it stay around.

Looks like a kludge

[Wesley Felter]

Why does this use LD_PRELOAD? Why not just patch GDK directly? Heck, why hasn't Xft support been integrated into a released version of GDK yet?

Re:Looks like a kludge

[diamondc]

> Why does this use LD_PRELOAD?
so apps dont have to be recompiled
and the library can be loaded on runtime.

>Why not just patch GDK directly?
there are patches to enable aa for gtk/gdk and they worked for 90% of the apps i tried, gedit crashing almost instantly.

also gtk/gdk 1.3 already has aa support, and so will 1.4 when it's released.

Re:Looks like a kludge

[damiam]

Heck, why hasn't Xft support been integrated into a released version of GDK yet?

It is fully supported in GTK1.3/2.0, which is due to be released this fall. I think the authors thought it was too much to put into a minor release of 1.2. And yes, it is a kludge, to tide us over until GTK2.0 is released.

Re:Looks like a kludge

[fault0]

I *highly* doubt GNOME 2.0 is going to be released this fall(in the next few months). I tried it last week and it seems like a bunch of small test apps.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[Bodero]

akamai is banned there? What censorware do you use? I hadn't seen one actually block all of akamai yet, I'd be interested in knowing which one did.

anti-aliasing

[Ender Ryan]

It's really funny(strange funny), I really like the way anti-aliased fonts look, just so much smoother and make the desktop so very pretty. For years I stared at anti-aliased fonts in windows, then I switched to Linux and didn't have them anymore, which I thought sucked but now I like it better simply because anti-aliased fonts make my eyes hurt. I had no idea what it was before, but, now I know what makes my eyes hurt more than anything while sitting at a computer.

Anyone else dislike anti-aliased fonts for this reason. Granted, some fonts just look absolutely horrible if they're not anti-aliased, but good fonts don't need it.

Re:anti-aliasing

[Webz]

Well, at smaller resolutions, fonts don't need to be anti-aliased. Moreover, they shouldn't be anti-aliased, as there is a limited amount of pixels to work with. It's like rendered polygons versus sprites in games. Sprites will always rule in low end systems because they are hand-tweaked. On higher res environments, rendered (anti-aliased) graphics are prettier and scalable and thus better.

Re:anti-aliasing

[holdp]

Agreed. I too find AA unhelpful. It's fine to *look* at, but if I try to *read* more than half a screenful, it hurts. My eyesight is somewhat less than acute, even with glasses - I don't know if that has any bearing on the matter.

This IS a big deal.

[mwillems]

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

Re:This IS a big deal.

[fault0]

> 1. File Conversion

needs work, gobe and hancom office's is supposed to be very good

> 2. OLE - "cut and paste"

kparts

> 3. Apps ("Office")

openoffice, koffice, staroffice, hancomoffice, gobe

> 4. Proper font support

what is not proper about it now?

> 5. Integration of user interface

just use all kde apps. kde is quite integrated. hopefully gnome2 will also be.

> 6. Speed/efficiency.

windows is faster than Linux? Uhh.

> 7. Platform standards

not sure what to make of this:

Re:This IS a big deal.

[be-fan]

needs work, gobe and hancom office's is supposed to be very good
>>>>
Gobe's isn't that great, at least in 2.0. Maybe they've improved it since then.

kparts
>>>>
Would be so kind as to point me to where I can embed my gnome apps into KDE without ugly hacks? How about my Athena apps? My FLTK apps? You see, Windows has only Win32 apps (stuff like MFC and OWL just wraps over Win32), so all this stuff is supported automagically.

openoffice, koffice, staroffice, hancomoffice, gobe
>>>>>
OpenOffice: Unreleased.
KOffice: Unfinished.
StarOffice: Slow (5.2) Unreleased (6.0)
Gobe: Unfeatured.

what is not proper about it now?
>>>>>
First, half of the advanced desktop apps (GNOME apps) don't seem to support AA. Then there is the fact that it uses a seperate API, which means that many older, but still very usefull apps (XPlayMidi!) may never get AA support. Lastly, font handling could be more unified between the DEs, and a proper GUI interface to XftConfig could be made.

just use all kde apps. kde is quite integrated. hopefully gnome2 will also be.
>>>>>>>>>
What about GIMP? But if you use GNOME, then what about KDevelop? That's just a plain STUPID idea.

windows is faster than Linux? Uhh.
>>>>>
Yea. On the desktop, the Windows GUI is a lot more responsive. Sure its due to ugly hacks in the scheduler (giving apps priority boosts for display) and VM (giving the front-most app first dibs on RAM), but it *works* Maybe Win2K processes SETI packets slower than Linux, but peak throughput isn't the biggest priority for desktop OSs.

not sure what to make of this:
>>>>>>>
I think he means that the platform should have standards. Like a standardized way to display text, standardized way to access components, standardized way to use widgets, etc. Note, however, that this needn't unncessarily curtail freedom. All that is needed is standard interfaces, not standard implementations. X had the right idea of how to do this. ICCM allows any window manager to work with any X application. Why the KDE and GNOME guys ditched this paradigm is beyond explanation...

Re:This IS a big deal.

[evilquaker]

Yea. On the desktop, the Windows GUI is a lot more responsive.

So renice X to -10 (standard in Debian). My home box (a PII 400) is way more responsive than my W2000 box at work (an Athlon 1K). Both boxes have 256 MB RAM.

Re:This IS a big deal.

[mwillems]

Not responding to flamebait is a principle of mine, but I will make an exception as this is important.

It's partly religion, sure. I don't like being dictated to the way MS does. I am the CTO, not MS.

But *much* more than religion, it's practical reasons that underlie my wish to go to Linux when it's ready for desktop deployment.

For starters, Windows costs us a lot of money (and increasingly so). Add up 100+ instances of Windows, add Office and the other apps (graphics, etc) we use, and you see that's a lot of money. Cash is tight. The CFO murders me when I go to him for yet another upgrade - can't wait till the users start clamouring for Win/Office XT... there goes another 100k.

Another reason is tech support. Windows combined with inexperienced users is causing us a lot of tech support hassles. As you are well aware, install a few apps here and there and once or twice a year you really have to re-install Windows from scratch. A Linux desktop is easier to keep under control.

A third reason is the OS itself. Say a user comes to me and wants a particular function or behaviour: very often, a cron job running a shell script and perhaps some freely available OSS software, and it's all done. And it's more stable as an OS: no reboots, worst case you restart X.

Then there's the fact we KNOW what the Linux box does. On the win boxes, the behaviour (right from startup on!) is a mystery that we should not ask about. God knows what all those DLL's do. Etc. All that imposes a support cost taht is considerable. Onthe Linux boxes we know, and we can even alter their behaviour if we need. On the Win boxes, it's 'keep your hands off and reboot if it gives you any truouble'.

The list goes on.

I will grant you that with the current list of 'not there yet on the desktop' things I outlined in my original post, rightnow Windows IS still the right tool for the job. Which is why we run it on all our desktop machines (except the sysadmins). But I want that to change for the above reasons.

Michael

PS I've been in IT management for years, thanks. ;)

Re:This IS a big deal.

[be-fan]

Been doing that since Slack 3.5. Doesn't help a bit. Also, its not just X, but Linux GUI applications in general. Windows developers, in my experience, go to a lot more trouble to make sure that their GUIs perform better. IE, for example, resizes very smoothly, while Konqueror rubber-bands like hell. You just see a whole lot more flicker in Linux programs.

PS> Hmm, office machines are notorious about being badly configured. Also, what WM are you running? Its not really fair to compare Win2K to something like BlackBox after all.

Re:This IS a big deal.

[evilquaker]

Been doing that since Slack 3.5. Doesn't help a bit.... Also, what WM are you running?

I should ask you the same question... with GNOME + E, the performance increase was obvious. With GNOME + Sawfish, it was less clear, but still noticable. Probably with BlackBox or IceWM it wouldn't be noticable at all.

Re:This IS a big deal.

[be-fan]

KDE-2. That and GNOME 1.4 are the only fair comparison to Win2K. I can't really tell the difference between BlackBox and Windows 2000, I'm guessing Win 3.1 (which BlackBox is technologically equivilent to) would be faster. Either way, I have to use either Konqueror or Galeon, and its unnaceptable to me to have my apps all look different.

This is a job for X, not GTK or KDE!!

[scott__]

Can anyone answer this for me? Shouldn't anti-aliased rendering of fonts be a job for X and not the desktop or window manager? Wouldn't it be cool to use hardware OpenGL acceleration in the video card to do this?

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[jovlinger]

Getting AA right is more than just \alpha blending. The rasterisation of the character to decide how to use the extra subpixles is non-trivial (I believe that microsoft or truetype has a patent or two on this). It makes a big difference for characters where the pixel is a large fraction of the character size.

libfreetype

[Salsaman]

error: failed dependencies:

libfreetype.so.6 is needed by gdkxft-1.0-1

Anybody know where I can get libfreetype from ?

I'm too lazy to search for it.

Re:libfreetype

[Salsaman]

OK, I found it in XFree86-libs-4.1.0

Clarification...

[FunkyChild]

Just to clarify something that may not be so clear - the gray pixels that AA adds isn't really interpolation per se - i.e. it doesn't make a guess based on the pixels around it.

Antialiasing approximates the colour of the pixel based on the proportion covered by the imaginary vector curve passing through that pixel.

For example, with no antialiasing, if a pixel would be partially covered by the mathematical vector curve of the font - the renderer would display a white pixel if 50% of that pixel was covered by the curve.

With antialiasing however, it's not an either/or black/white situation. If a pixel is partially covered by the edge vector of the glyph, it determines the colour to display for that pixel based on the proportion of the pixel covered. So if the imaginary curve of the font covered a small piece (say 10% worth) on the corner of the pixel, then the pixel would be drawn at 10% black. If the glyph theoretically covered up 80% of the pixel, then it would be drawn at 80% black. This way the curve can be approximated by using variations in colour, since there isn't any more resolution to use in displaying it.

This is the theory anyway AFAIK - I'm not too sure of the implementation details in xft for example. However most AA techniques I've heard of have involved rendering the image at double the size or something, and making the guesses on how much of the pixel is covered based on that larger image.

Re:berlin?

[jetski666]

Is Berlin supposed to be the answer to an X redo?

A misconception

[The Pim]

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

Actually, it's rather the opposite: at low resolutions, anti-aliasing is usually less desirable. When the width of a stroke is around a single pixel, a grey pixel stands out in a big way, making the glyph look fuzzy. If glyphs are pixel-aligned (ie, they start and end on pixel boundaries) and upright (not italicized or rotated), a non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is much cleaner. (It follows eg that word-processing software should favor magnification levels such that glyphs have integral pixel width and hand-hinting, and fudge a little to put glyphs on pixel boundaries.)

At higher resolutions, there are simply more pixels to play with, and a few grey pixels blend in nicely. 75 dpi versus 100 dpi doesn't make a huge difference, but when we get 300 dpi screens, we'll wonder how we ever put up with today's blocky text.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[znu]

The secret at small font sizes is 'hinting', as someone else pointed out. See patent USUS5325479: Method and apparatus for moving control points in displaying digital typeface on raster output devices. This is a patent granted to Apple in 1992. (Apple and Microsoft cross-license a bunch of patents related to TrueType, IIRC.)

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[daw]

I hate to say it, but the ClearType technology in Windows XP blows AA fonts out of the water.

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

Nonlinear pixel response requires gamma correction

[yerricde]

When the width of a stroke is around a single pixel, a grey pixel stands out in a big way

That's partially because of a nonlinearity between the number of electrons shot at a phosphor and the luminous intensity. A gray pixel needs to be at 50% luminous intensity, or it'll stand out as you mentioned. To correct for this, video hardware and software raise every displayed pixel to the power of gamma. For most displays, gamma correction of 0.45 or so produces a response that's nice and linear, and you can use traditional time-domain convolution to low-pass filter the text bitmap and remove the spatial frequency aliasing.

a non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is much cleaner.

A non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is also patented.

but when we get 300 dpi screens

The future is now. Color LCD screens have always been about 300 x 100 dpi; recent versions of Microsoft GDI used in Windows CE and XP can tap into the individual red, green, and blue pixels for even cleaner text.

It's already been done!

[Performer Guy]

Ahh, you want NeWS. That's been done and was torpedoed by X years ago. It was a PostScript desktop with native PostScript rendering. Major UNIX workstation vendors had it as standard on their desktop, folks like SGI and IBM pushed it but in the end they caved in to the prevailing trend and moved over to X. If X had lost that little war then we'd all have embedded PostScript rendering in EVERYTHING on the desktop. Now you want to wind the clock back. You have to lie in the bed all those old fuddy duddy IT managers made for you. The only way to get even now is to inflict some misery on future generations.

Re:It's already been done!

[Anonymous Coward]

Two points to make about this:

NeWS was somewhat ahead of its time. Back in Ancient History, workstations simply didn't have enough power to do Display PostScript effectively. It seems funny to call X11 "lightweight", but it was better then DPS.

The second point is that Display PDF != Display PostScript. My understanding (and I might be wrong) is that Display PDF fixes a lot of the brain damage that was in DPS.

No, we can't turn back the clock (and NeWS wasn't a panacea by any means), but Apple may have actually done something right for a change by embracing Display PDF. I would really like to see an OSS movement to clone the good parts of what Apple has done (and throw away the stupid parts, of which there are many -- this is Apple we're talking about).

Re:It's already been done!

[Jay Carlson]

Ahh, you want NeWS.

Yes, yes, we all want NeWS. But X won because it was Open Source. And it didn't look like a single company, Sun, had complete control of its future.

I'd make some kind of Java analogy here, but there isn't a good stand-in in the analogy for X.

Re:It's already been done!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was not "open source" (Motif was never open source, but that didn't stop everyone from standardizing on it for a while).

The problem was the $200/machine licence fee that Adobe was demanding for DPS. That sunk NeXT as a general purpose OS, and forced Apple to do extensive re-engineering of their display server. DEC and so on (and later free unixes) went with X because there wasn't some big cut to pay to a 3rd party.

Re:It's already been done!

[stripes]

My understanding (and I might be wrong) is that Display PDF fixes a lot of the brain damage that was in DPS.

No, it doesn't. In fact it loses some of the nice DPS and NeWS things, like there being no real standard way to embed a PDF drawing in another PDF (you can encapsulate a PS in another PS -- that is what EPS is for). Also with NeWS at least you could have the "display engine" do a fair bit of local processing, PDF dispenses with most (or all) of the programmability, it is pretty much just a rendering system.

What is the big advantage of display PDF? Well display PostScript requires a Adobe license. Adobe wanted to make PDF a standard so it is free, and Adobe licenses it's patents on whatever PDF needs for free as well. Display PDF being an extension of PDF is also free (well, Apple doesn't have to pay Adobe, that doesn't mean we get it for free).

Re:It's already been done!

[Reality Master 101]

No, it doesn't. In fact it loses some of the nice DPS and NeWS things, like there being no real standard way to embed a PDF drawing in another PDF (you can encapsulate a PS in another PS -- that is what EPS is for).

I don't know much about Display PDF, but isn't that what a Window is for? Presumably you can create windows objects wherever you want.

Also with NeWS at least you could have the "display engine" do a fair bit of local processing, PDF dispenses with most (or all) of the programmability, it is pretty much just a rendering system.

I see that is a good thing, frankly. It seems to me that programmability belongs at the programming level, not at the rendering level. I bet stripping that out reduces the complexity considerably. I mean, if you want a scripting layer, it wouldn't be hard to define something like that above the rendering layer.

In fact, I really have to congratulate Adobe for actually reducing bloat on a standard, rather than increasing it. I'm a big believer in things being only as complex as it needs to be, and no more.

Re:It's already been done!

[spitzak]

NeWS did not use DPS. NeWS had it's own, much faster and smaller PostScript interpreter, which did much more than DPS, such as handle the creation of windows and sending events to widgets, and it had an object-oriented system added on (though initially this was just PostScript dictionaries).

The Adobe license had nothing to do with the death of NeWS. It was entirely due to the lack of source code and an attempt by Sun to sell it for a large amount of money. At the same time, X cost $120 and came with source code. Motif is meaningless because at the same time as Motif there was no freer alternative.

The other Unix companies actually panicked because they saw how good NeWS was, and formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) whose main purpose was to prevent Sun from setting arbitrary standards. To do this they set standards on any junk (like X and Motif) that they could find as long as it was not Sun's. Though it is possible that an unchecked Sun would have been as evil as MicroSoft is today, the main effect was that the Unix vendors all fought each other and ignored MicroSoft until MicroSoft took over.

Anti-aliasing in X?

[steevo.com]

Wouldn't the ideal AA solution having AA support directly in X? Seems like using the window manager to deal with font manipulation adds more layers of complexity.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[spauldo]

Why not? X has had remote display support since day 1, and microsoft spent a lot of time and money on terminal server (funny they call it that) and it's still subpar.

'sides, how many companies work on the windoze display technology? Now how many work on X? Check out www.x.org sometime. XFree doesn't do everything - most of the code's already there for X (I run a standard X11R6.5 distro on my server, since it has no monitor and I only use X on it for remote display) so they can afford to work on the minor points such as this. And considering that Sun, SGI, IBM, and HP are all riding on X, I'm sure this kind of thing is being helped.

Re:integrated desktop

[spauldo]

Suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I can't stand KDE. I use GNOME, and if I couldn't, I'd probably go back to afterstep or one of those newer window managers like blackbox (yes, I know blackbox isn't really _new_, but I've been using GNOME since about 0.20).

Hinting and patents

[Wesley Felter]

A non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is also patented.

I don't think so. Apple has patents on one method of hinting, but other methods (e.g. plain old bitmaps) are not patented.

Can't get it working....

[nanotron]

using redhat 7.1....

Reading /etc/X11/XF86Config
Reading /etc/X11/fs/config
Scanning font directories...
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/75dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/75dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/misc failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/misc failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/75dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/100dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/japanese failed
Inspection of /usr/share/abisource/fonts failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/100dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/misc failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/Type1 failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/100dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/75dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/Type1 failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi failed
Inspection of /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 failed
Building /etc/X11/XftConfig
Creating /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/gdkxft
Creating /usr/share/themes/Gdkxft/gtk/gtkrc

Any ideas?

I can see the theme installed but no anti-aliasing.....

Re:Can't get it working....

[sish]

I had the same problem, fixed it using "PATH=$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin gdkxft_sysinstall" to run the script (xftcache wasn't in my $PATH after su'ing to root, and gdkxft_sysinstall didn't like that).

Re:Holy shit

[Goldberg's Pants]

While you're a troll and probably have a fat ass, I'll respond.

Win 3.11 had AA'ed fonts as well if you ran a particular program at startup. Think it was on Adobe program.

big deal

[Cardhore]

My voodoo 4 has had full screen anti-aliasing since, like, six months ago.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[cca93014]

Granted the remote support in X supercedes anything MS has done in the past and is still more flexible than terminal services, but I wasn't talking about that. Also, the remote display support in X is one of its core features, not something that is enabled with a cryptic line in a config file.

I don't think that it has anything to do with the number of people working on the technology. How many people invented Google? The Apple? TCP/IP? HTML? In some situations having a large number of developers is a good thing; writing the large number of device drivers for linux, for example. I don't think it is the same in this case, though.

IBM and HP riding in X? That's quite funny.

I've worked a lot with many versions of Windows, Solaris nee SunOS and Linux. Cutting through the individual display technologies, all I can say is that the fonts in XP look way better than anything I have ever seen before. Every colleague who has seen XP running (including many MacOS designers) have literally dropped their jaw. It's the first thing that they mention when they see the desktop.

Wait and see for yourself. I know the majority of /.ers will try really hard not to like it, but I'm just trying to be objective...Does anybody remember how to do that?

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that Blublockers infomercial a few years back and the incessant rambling about how blue light doesn't focus clearly on the retina?

Microsoft Cleartype is the umbrella term for several technologies such as subpixel anti-aliasing (not invented by MS), understanding how to best use wavelengths to display a clear image to the eye (not invented by MS), some monitor/lcd callibration, and several inconsequential abstraction layers/libraries to allow people to use these technologies easier. Eg, display a jpeg regularly, or via the Cleartype way that moves specific wavelengths so the eye can focus more clearly and get a crisper image.

Microsoft aren't stupid. They're doing what they've always done. They don't invent, but they market very well. That's smart of them.

New title: Gnome a little closer to being ..

[OSgod]

as good as Windows 95. Given a few years it may be as good as 98... and shortly after that (2005 or so) we expect it to surpass the gui in W2K.

OS X

[whjwhj]

OS X has outstanding font rendering technology, but you don't see any /. posts about it. Somebody produces a half-ass hack for Gnome and it gets press. Typical.

Re:OS X

[mrfiddlehead]

Speaking of typical ...

Try ROX-Filer

[SCHecklerX]

It's a filemanager/pinboard done right.

http://rox.sourceforge.net/rox_filer.php3

Here are a couple of pictures of ROX running on my desktop:

Desktop 1
Desktop 2

Re:Try ROX-Filer

[hereticmessiah]

ROX rocks. It's a clone of the RISC OS filer and the pinboard. I've been meaning to get a copy of it for a while. Thanks for reminding me.

Works with Debian.

[Brett Viren]

I tried it on my Sid/Woody system. Worked as advertised. Did you go through the README file?

It does make menus and some other GTK fonts look significantly nicer (at least on this 133 DPI LCD).

However, the three things I stare at most are xemacs, gnome-terminal and galeon, none of which are changed by this hack.

AA in jEdit

[foxcub]

I was just wondering. I installed jEdit recently (after not using it for a while) under Linux-Mandrake, and if I choose anti-aliasing in there (within the program itself), it's gorgeous - comparable if not better than I've seen in Windows, really eye-pleasing. The question is how do they do it, and is there a way to take it from there and put into X or KDE or whereever appropriate?

Hinting included.. with payment

[bLitzfeuer]

Freetype (and thus X) can support hinting. The reasons you dont see it is because of nasty pantents, explained here

Freetype crew explains:

However, the source code for the bytecode interpreter is still available and can be toggled on at compile time, for those that want to use it anyway (because they purchased a license from Apple, or because they're in a country where the patents do not apply, etc..)

If this is the case then simply go to..

cd pathToFreetype2Code/include/freetype/config

Open the ftoption.h file and find the line that has...

#undef TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

Change `undef' to `define' and you should be good to go.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[mallie_mcg]

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?

I dont notice any more. I used tinkertool to disable antialiasing on my OS X box. Why i hear you all cry in disbelief. Well on the LCD of my iBook (0rigSE) at 800x600 it is absolutly horrible to look at, it just looks wrong. Has anyone else noticed that antialiasing on an LCD (with larger pixels) looks awful?.

redundant ;-)

[staeci]

I have a old 14 inch ktx monitor with crap dot-pitch, thus I have full screen hardware anti-aliasing on everything ;-)

Xrender

[bLitzfeuer]

Can someone *please* come up with a spec for overhauling font management in X? Overhauling X in general? Just steal display PDF from Apple/Adobe?

Xrender is an extension to the X protocol implemented in XFree86 that is resposible for the anti-aliasing in Qt/KDE. It supports Porter/Duff operations for image composition (true alpha blending) and elements found in DisplayPDF (paths, transformations, etc...). A good introduction to Xrender ideas and why the current X protocol was "blundered" are here. I especially like the part:

At one meeting, members of the X11 team looked around the table and discovered that not one of them had any clue about splines. Instead of doing something wrong, they left them out.

That pretty much sums up the hackery that is the X Window System.

Re:Xrender

[Anonymous Coward]

That pretty much sums up the hackery that is the X Window System.

Er... that pretty much sums up the state of the rendering in X11.

But there's much more to X11 than just rendering. X11 is a system designed from the ground up to be efficient across the network (minimised roundtrips). It is a system with powerful event-dispatch facilities. And so on, and so on.

I don't think it would be fair to reduce X11 to just its rendering component.

Re:Xrender

[spitzak]

Improved rendering would go a long way to making X better for networking. I find it quite incredible that X requires a round trip to select a color to draw in (but it does, if you want to handle Colormaps in any reasonable way by multiple programs). And there is no way to do fonts on Xlib reasonably without having a program enumerate every single font and then apply it's own logic to choose the one it wants. On a system with thousands of fonts this is a significant startup overhead.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[daw]

I somehow fail to believe that a technology that MS have spent a long time and a lot of money developing is _exactly the same thing_ as an option buried in XFree.

It's good technology, but it's a very, very simple idea and a straightforward extension of basic antialiasing; it's only the branding exercise that makes you think Microsoft spent any time or money on it. There's also a reason I suspect that it's buried in XFree86 and not trumpeted around much: Microsoft has it patented. The patent is completely spurious, of course, as subpixel sampling has been around since the Apple II era at least (NYTimes had a good article about just this when the patent was granted), but one would presume the Xfree folks don't want to go to court over it.

Also, as another poster pointed out, there's several odds and ends that go under the rubric ClearType, (though the main one having to do with fonts on LCD screens, which was the original topic of this thread, is subpixel sampling). And there's also several other reasons fonts look better in Windows than Linux. In particular, the fonts themselves are much, much better, and the font rendering engine is better as well. But yes, basically the same infrastructure *is* buried in XFree86, it's just not tweaked as nicely yet.

Re:OS X -- not only fonts

[anarkhos]

Not only does OS X support anti-aliased fonts, but any bezier path is anti-aliased in OS X.

Just imagine if something than runs on Linux does that, it would probably get it's own category on slashdot |-\

Re:Nonlinear pixel response requires gamma correct

[shandrew]

Xft can also handle subpixel rendering.:

match edit rgba=bgr;

Anti-aliasing is also useful at high resolutions, as is partial pixel rendering (as seen in several high-res printers).

Your right... but

[bLitzfeuer]

Likewise with the people who can seriously suggest that the GIMP is a workable replacement for Photoshop, which is a laughable notion for anything except web graphics.

Well not really laughable, but definitly not a viable replacement for some commercial use, I have to agree. The thing that gets to me about your post is that you just don't seem to realize these are small size development teams that produce these applications for linux. There are just a handfull of KOffice developers while in a commercial setting there would be whole developments departments and teams dedicated eight hours a day to just one application of an office package. Comparing one against the other us as unfair as comparing a Ferrari fundedFormula One car to the '67 Camaro with the rebuilt 427 your neigbor just dropped in. That said the very fact that some linux applications are actually competitive to commercial appz is awe inspiring, to say the least.

The other thing that gets me about your post is that it's always the easiest to make wish-list or spot "the right direction". I'm sorry but unless your contrubiting, keep those thoughts to yourself or post them where developers can view them, /. already gets way too much of that and most developers don't read /. (if you dont beleive me look and the lack of posts in the developers only articles).

end rand...

Commercial solutions are on thier way. Hancom is releasing what is seamingly (pre-emptive-screen-shot-only-assumption) a robust office package for linux, windows, mac os X. If you're looking for a microsoft alternative you may want to give them a shot.

Those things are being worked on too

[TonyGreene]

I don't know about the gnome-terminal thing, but the points made in the Sun usability study are being addressed. The latest release of gdm already incorporates changes made specifically because of that study.

Great!

[TonyGreene]

I've always been bothered by the slowness of the menus on my GNOME desktops. I knew about nice/renice, but I didn't think to apply it here. Thanks.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[MasterVidBoi]

The GTK anti-aliasing is still being handled by the FreeType engine, which is IMHO perceptively as good as it gets. But you're begging for the screenshots aren't you? Here are some tiny morsels for you :)

This interested me, so I did a quick comparison. I wanted to compare directly against your example shots, but I couldn't find a font close enough to what you used to make it worth anything. Instead, I decided to compare anti-aliasing in QuickDraw and CoreGraphics, like the previous poster said. To do this, I compared OmniWeb, which renders with CG, to Internet Explorer 5, which renders with the older QD.

Each of these 4 shots were taken using the Times New Roman font

Huge fonts
Medium fonts
Small fonts
Tiny fonts

Just by looking at this, I think it's fairly obvious that large text sizes minimize the differences in AA implementations, and the differences really become aparent at small size. Of course, that could also be Hinting, as other posts have pointed out. I really don't know...

The tiniest size really is a different story, because QuickDraw doesn't even anti-alias at that size. It's interesting to compare them anyway.

all your font processing is belongs to X!

[steffl]

...and bases belong to their respective owners...

anyway, how braindead is this? (IMO a lot)

KDE and Gnome writing their own antialiasing font engine (server/library/whatever)?

why don't they each provide video card drivers?

they should both be renamed to Cancer...

erik

Re:all your font processing is belongs to X!

[Anonymous Coward]

huh? Both KDE and GNOME are now using the XRENDER extension to XFree, and the accompanying Xft library (a version of freetype conforming to X-ish ways of doing things).

They most definitely did NOT have to write their own font engines.

Re:all your font processing is belongs to X!

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE and Gnome writing their own antialiasing font engine (server/library/whatever)?

No, they ain't.

FreeType have written a new rendering engine. Keith Packard (of XFree86) has designed an extension for efficient client-side text rendering (known as RENDER), and a client-side library to use the extension with FreeType-generated glyphs (Xft). KDE has been adapted to use Xft.

Bitstream fonts

[mj6798]

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.

I think it's worth pointing out that TrueType is neither the only, nor the first, hinting technology. It does give font designers a lot of control, but it also requires a lot of work.

Maybe the TrueType tradeoffs are wrong for the open source community (not having minions of font designers that we can hire), and we should focus more on using a different hinting technology that automates the process, even if the end product is slightly less good than what you might get out of TrueType.

Re: What is anti-aliasing?

[super-flex-o-matic]

hmm... last night i pondered over a book, where the method of antialiasing is described.
all in all AA takes the pixels and blends it 4 times over each other, each time moved by 0.5 pixels.
sadly i discovered my 700 PS 1 fonts got somehow broken by afm2pfm. at sizes smaller than 12 pixels the edges of the characters begin to form ugly spots.
the good thing is however, abisource fonts look flawless...

maybe its time to check out some open-source font-editor.

Where to start?

[mrfiddlehead]

Where do we start? How do we get our X server's properly configured? How about all the rest of our configuration files, from fstab, to exports, to modules.conf conf.modules, and sysconfig. Everything under /etc has a different format.

We start by defining a common format, in XML, and use filters to convert between the old and the new formats for these files until the libraries are written to read/write the new formats from the applications that need them (backwards compatible filters would probably be a GOOD THING for a while, just to keep a version of these files around ... you could even have a daemon watching the files to decide if they've changed for those who go ahead and edit the old format.)

The need for this is for simplification of configuration. A simple GUI (ala window's regedit) could be written to configure. I'm not suggesting that we should use a flatfile database like the windows registry. Not in the least. Just that every application should store its data in the same format and use the same configuration editor to tweak the guts and that the configuration should be stored in a common location under /etc to avoid conflicting with the legacy (excuse the term) application configuration files.

Of course, this could be extended to user configuration for programs as well so that all configuration data ends up in one location under $HOME. This sure would be a nice way to backup one's configuration without jumping through hoops.

Am I reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing working towards doing something like this?

XP has "clear type"

[Ilgaz]

I know, Clear Type is a 1980's invention (just check http://grc.com/cleartype.htm )but appearantly, as X-Setup for Windows shows here (you can consider it like a linuxconf wannabe allthough, it is good) Windows XP has Clear Type technology built in.

So, if they wanted to "wait" us for this amount of time just for drawing gray pixels near fonts, they should come with Clear Type like (and I repeat,I am deeply believing, it is just a 80's sub-cga gfx invention) technology.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[mabinogi]

let me get this straight....you're telling us that AA is 'Old hat' because ClearType in an operating system that hasn't even been released yet does it?

I could understand if you refered to the font smothing in Win9x, but the fact that you actually mentioned XP as your justification for the statement is a little confusing...

Unless you meant the sub-pixel stuff....but that isn't AA in itself, it just a technology that can improve AA even more on LCD displays, due multiplying the effective horizontal resolution.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[cca93014]

Er, I was saying that the technology has been superceded.

I know that XP isn't out yet, but it is soon, isn't it?

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[spauldo]

IBM and HP riding in X? That's quite funny.

I'm not sure how much IBM relies on their AIX sales, but HP is the second largest UNIX hardware manufacturer in the world. You bet they're riding on X.

Besides, your statement was "I somehow fail to believe that a technology that MS have spent a long time and a lot of money developing is _exactly the same thing_ as an option buried in XFree. They are not that stupid.". I'm just pointing out that just because someone throws a lot of money at something doesn't mean it's superior. Remember when MSN went up against AOL?

Now as to the fonts, I'm sure microsoft's fonts look better than those in XFree. Hell, my handwriting looks better than the default fonts with XFree... Antialiasing was never part of the X protocol. To fix the problem properly, the X protocol needs to be changed and XFree needs some decent fonts. People are working on the X protocol to add this, and I'm sure one of these days companies like Sun and SGI will realize the problem and give XFree some good fonts.

Theft [was Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting]

[sydb]

While I agree with your sentiments about copyright, I am confused about your logic in not applying similar reasoning to trademarks (and presumably other forms of intellectual 'property').

If trademark duplication can diminish reputation, and this makes such duplication undesirable, surely copyright violation can diminish the copyright-holders reputation too (if, for example, the copyrighted work was modified to include inaccuracies, or otherwise subverted). Additionally, copyright violation can certainly reduce the copyright holder's income from said work. Is income to be held to lower value than reputation?

You say that copyright is government-sanctioned theft from the commons of thought. Are trademarks not government-sanctioned theft from the commons of imagery, or 'devices'?

And where do you stand on patents?

As I said, I don't necessarily disagree but I'm always on the lookout for good arguments for and against "IP", and perhaps you have some.

Re:Theft [was Re:Computer AA vs. Hinting]

[prizog]

" If trademark duplication can diminish reputation, and this makes such duplication undesirable, surely copyright violation can diminish the copyright-holders reputation too (if, for example, the copyrighted work was modified to
include inaccuracies, or otherwise subverted)."

Those things are not about copyright but about attribution. In fact, until 1990, US copyright laws didn't say anything about attribution.

"Additionally, copyright violation can certainly reduce the copyright holder's income from said work. Is income to be held to lower value than reputation?"

But income is not due to them. If copyright laws were intended to provide income to those who create works, they would simply provide income. Of course, the issue with trademarks isn't that unauthorized usage diminishes reputation, but that it does so dishonestly. Consider Javascript, named to ride on the hype about Java.

"You say that copyright is government-sanctioned theft from the commons of thought. Are trademarks not government-sanctioned theft from the commons of imagery, or 'devices'?"

If abused, absolutely. But a trademark ought not to stop the use of a mark in general, but only in unfair competition with the originator - and since the name of a company or its logo is not particularly expressive, it does not bother me that companies have a more limited namespace from which to choose their names. But of course abuse has been very rampant these days.

"And where do you stand on patents?"

We need to find ways of encouraging research which actually work. Patents these days constrain innovation more often than they promote it. When patents are successful (such as the drug industry, kinda), they still cause suffering.

It is very important to separate the issues of intellectual honesty (fair credit and attribution) from those of restriction and from those of payment.

No doubt about it.

[James Skarzinskas]

Heck, I've run Windows 2000 Server reliably for quite a while, and all my applications work great! Even with all the 'little features'. I was implying that if you keep layering these little features onto the graphical environment in heaps, eventually you are going to start to lose performance. Yeah, MS's COM and DCOM generally seem to work better. I'm no MS-supporter, but, I'm not going to be close-minded and shun it away as a "crappy microsoft product". I quite enjoyed using it, and it gave me great up-time and server performance.

Nothing useful or fun? Try me.

[James Skarzinskas]

Nothing useful or fun? Well, lets start by saying that loads of people are creating open source alternatives for your "useful" natively Windows platform tools, and if you want to say no fun, I would hazard a guess you have never been to linuxgames.com, or heard of Loki Games, who are doing a dandy job of porting the best games over to the Linux platform.

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[TangoCharlie]

And ClearType isn't?! I was under the impression that Apple used "ClearType" technology on the Apple IIe but dropped it from the Macintosh because the Mac had a better display. In fact Apple had the technology patented... until recently when the patent expired. I'm sure there's a /. post to this...

Re:Anti Aliasing fonts is old hat...

[TangoCharlie]

Got it! The /. article is: here. It's a post about a link to a discussion about ClearType and Apple at pcworld (of all places)!!