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The RENDER Extension: The Wait Hurtles On

Posted by timothy on from the work-in-progress-send-money-to-artist dept.

augros writes: "Keith Packard, responsible for the X RENDER extension, is still working diligently on the X component that may one day make X a rival to other bleeding edge windowing systems (...ahem, *Quartz*). It's thanks to RENDER that 'xterm -fa arial' gives you a sleek anti-aliased terminal and k-jofol can offer you those funky-shaped skins. But how long will it be before X wields true-translucent windows? The cheap hacks (eterm) have lasted way too long. Read Packard's article; he goes over the details of what will need to be done. If you're interested in the current level of development check out Packard's screenshot. I tried his code myself and had to do tweak it a bit before the window even mapped. He claims it worked as true-transparency on his box, albeit painfully slow, however all I got was alpha-blended rectangles on an unrefreshing background." And watch this space for an XFree86-related interview, too :)

17 comments

  1. howto antialias? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does anyone know how to turn antialiasing on? I don't use KDE or Gnome, just straight blackbox. But I'd love to have emacs21, Mozilla, rxvt, etc. use antialiased fonts. Do I need to add something to .Xresources for this?

    1. Re:howto antialias? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >emacs21

      i think xemacs-gtk supports xft rendering, grab gtk-xft.

      >Mozilla

      grab gtk-xft.

      >rxvt

      don't think it does yet. but xterm has support. so does konsole, gnome-terminal.

      although many people consider terminals to be bad with antialiased text. however, with a good font, it's quite good. I'm using bitstream's courier from beos, and it looks absolutely beutiful in konsole.

    2. Re:howto antialias? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well crap,
      as mozilla does not use gtk-widgets but something else (even for the stuff around the html-page) it won't work, no way!

  2. Xfree interview? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Kick ass, Timothy. Osnews.com has been the best place for interviews but I always preferred slashdot interviews.

  3. Kjofol by Howie · · Score: 2

    Isn't it the SHAPE extension that allows Kjofol to do funky shaped skins? Isn't that what oclock and xeyes has been doing since at least 1992 or so?

    --
    "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
    1. Re:Kjofol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, but when has a /. post ever been checked for accuracy?

    2. Re:Kjofol by augros · · Score: 1

      of course you're absolutely right. sorry, wasn't thinking when i was typing. kinda like the guy who thinks his mule is pregnant. gosh, that's a little embarrassing since i'm heavily using SHAPE in my current development. RENDER is only for anti-aliased fonts, alpha blending and soon other geometric thingies (polygons i think). oops.

    3. Re:Kjofol by mini+me · · Score: 1

      I've never used Kjofol under X, but I'm assuming it uses render to make the program's edges anti-aliased instead of the hard shapes seen in programs like xeyes.

  4. Re:Take 'em All by Per+Wigren · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I saw them live on Holidays In The Sun, Morecambe, UK this summer... Great concert! ;)

    Kinda offtopic though.. :-P

    --
    My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  5. Enlighten me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Enlighten me as to what that 'screenshot' is supposed to prove. I see one window which appears to have only the window border and no innards with the window behind it showing. That's considered progress?

    1. Re:Enlighten me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      for KDE users, try the mosfet-liquid theme. it offers translucent menus and very well coordinated and practical color scheme. i'll never change to another theme again.

    2. Re:Enlighten me by augros · · Score: 1

      those are unfortunately not TRUE translucent menus -- which are however good enough for menus. you see, that theme merely takes a screenshot of the desktop and alpha blends it with the image of the menu to be laid down. since menus are override-redirect there is little chance of the background changing while they are there, which creates the illusion of transparency. (try running an xterm listing out a VERY long file, or compiling somthing, behind it. it won't seem so see-through anymore. the RENDER extension is working on this.

    3. Re:Enlighten me by augros · · Score: 2, Informative

      no, i submitted a different screenshot on the same site. how /. screwed it up i'll be darned if i know. check out the REAL screenshot at http://www.eax.com/render/screen.png

  6. xterm -fa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd like to hear more about "-fa", which is new to me. It appears that my xterm ("XFree86 4.0.2(151)") supports it, but it's not documented, even in the output from "xterm -h". Also, I seem to get a courier font regardless of the fontname I specify with "-fa".

    BTW, what's k-jofol? I think there should be a link there.

  7. mozilla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    what really pisses me off that Mozilla still does not support AA-Text (yeah, there is a gdk-xft patch but not for Galeon...)

    interesting question: why is the AA-Text with Linux so blurry? Windows looks way better!

    I can't believe that it is soooo hard to do a reasonable AA (no aa between 8-14px, only AA the "round" places and not simply blur the whole letter which looks awful)

    any comments on this?

    1. Re:mozilla by pdh11 · · Score: 1
      I can't believe that it is soooo hard to do a reasonable AA (no aa between 8-14px, only AA the "round" places and not simply blur the whole letter which looks awful)

      any comments on this?

      It probably depends what you're used to. To me, whole-letter blurring looks "right" and Windows' blurring of the round places looks "wrong". And 8-14px is exactly when I want the text anti-aliased!

      Peter