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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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

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

[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

[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.

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

[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?

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...

[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: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: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???

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

[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: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: 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: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.

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.

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...

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

[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?

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: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!

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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: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: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

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!

[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!

[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.

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.

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.

big deal

[Cardhore]

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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?