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

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: 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

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

[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: 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: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.

[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: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

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... ^_^)

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.

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: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: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: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