Xft Support For Mozilla

keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.

Comments

VERY exciting

[kwj8fty1]

This patch looks very promising. One of windows XP's big claim was better LCD support; they are right, it does look quite sharp on any type of square pixel display.

As I'm sure most of you know, most monitors use round pixels, whereas most LCDs use square or the more typical rectangular pixels. So what this means from a GUI standpoint: You need to optimize for the output device. The end result in the screenshot looks GREAT.

Good work guys!

Gdkxft has had this for a while

[ronmon]

It anti-aliases your GNOME widget fonts and there is a separate patch for Mozilla (good up to 0.9.6), which works nicely with Galeon, BTW.

Check it out.

This is actually a new feature for Mozilla...

[OneFix]

Yea, the tree closed for 0.9.8 like a week ago. Tree Closes for 0.9.8. For those that don't want to click the link, here's what it says...

...0.9.8 will have a variety of new items including new natively drawn widgets on WindowsXP, Mac OS X, and GTK, when you are in the classic skin (We will have more on this later, including screenshots)...

If you're really interested in what's going on with the project, try the latest Build Comments

Yesterday was the last of the frozen trunk builds. And if that's not enough, the Tree Is Opened for 0.9.9 checkins.

And there's now a Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto that lays down precisely what Mozilla 1.0 should be (which will come right after 0.9.9).

Of course, it's nice to see a change in SlashDot change its view of the project. But, then again, maybe I was right all along. :)

Re:Huh?

[keithp]

Why don't you concentrate on making sure the code works instead of aiming for some arbitrary patch size?

It's not arbitrary; I believe about 3/4 of the patch consist of unnecessary changes to code that shouldn't be executed in the Xft code path. Unfortunately, the internal abstractions for dealing with fonts are somewhat strained in the current code base, making this assertion testable but not easily verified by visual inspection.

Depends

[jeti]

Antialiased fonts can look extremely good and
make reading less stressful for the eyes.

Look at text in newer versions of MacOS, BeOS
or Windows XP. Especially at LCD screens the
quality is absolutely convincing.

BUT you need not only a good font renderer, but
also fonts that are hinted correctly.

XFT is...

[skia]

For the uninitiated:

Xft is a simple library designed to interface the FreeType rasterizer with the X Rendering Extension.

FreeType is a software font engine that can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, etc. to produce high quality glyphs and characters. The important thing here is that FreeType supports Adobe Type1 and TrueType (that is, Windows) scalable fonts.

the X Rendering Extension is a protocol that represents a new way to render (that is, draw) stuff on your screen in X windows.

thus, Xft's incorporation into Mozilla gives us smooth, high quality, Windows compatible fonts while surfing the web on Linux or *BSD

Re:Oh dear

[damiam]

If you don't read AA fonts at normal sizes, then don't use them. I only enable them for larger fonts, where they look good.

Put this into /etc/X11/Xftconfig:

match
any size > 8
any size < 15
edit
antialias = false;