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

Oh dear

[Tony Hoyle]

Whoopee.... blurry text, just what I needed.

Luckily I never load Render & I never intend to - after about 5 minutes of looking at KDE with it enabled I had a bad headache. That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the eyes.

I remember when the old archimedes did the same thing... it kinda worked there because they were crappy monitors anyway. With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement.

Re:Oh dear

[st. augustine]

Whoopee.... blurry text, just what I needed....That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the eyes....it kinda worked [back in the day] because they were crappy monitors anyway. With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement.

I love it when people can't tell the difference between "I hate it" and "It sucks."

Wait for stability

[kenneth_martens]

While I like the idea of making my Mozilla browsing experience more aesthetically pleasing, I am not willing to sacrifice stability.

This new patch is great, but you shouldn't update yet. Wait until it's merged into the official release. Unless, of course, you like to try out new things, in which case go get the update.

Anyway, I look forward to getting the final version of this. (Until then, I'll just have to buy a bigger monitor.)

Re:So what you're telling me is...

[Archie Steel]

Not Linux, young troll, Mozilla. Anti-aliased fonts have been available for quite a while in KDE and Gnome. Speaking of which...is it me, or does Netscape 6.2 already support anti-aliased fonts?

In any case, I'm still waiting for important stuff, like multipe consoles and desktops, good memory management, remote graphical apps, etc. to be standard features on Windows...

Huh?

[Score0, Overrated]

The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines

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

Re:LCD what?

[chabotc]

This patch patches mozilla to fully use Xft rendering. The other patch patched mozilla to use GDK rendering.

Mozilla is trying to move away from using gdk for its font rendering to make it more portable and less reliant on gdk. Also it should be more flexiable and faster.

I gues the difference in size comes from the fact that it takes more code to use Xft directly then to use libgdkxft. (this is kinda obvious, since the Xft using code is then in libgdkxft).

Bottom line though, the libgdkxft patch didnt have a chance to get included in main stream mozilla, where as this ones probably does.

Lets get some facts straight first.

[clump]

That Linux has to kludge in a feature that Windows has had for seven years?

So basically, we are still waiting for it to be a standard feature?

What I think people should keep in mind is that you are comparing a multi-billon-dollar corporation with access to all kinds of patents and trade secrets to what *volunteers* do in their spare time. Keep in mind access to good fonts are what corporations like Microsoft and Apple *slow down* to keep people on their platforms.

If you want to stick your head out against possible liability so others can *freely* use something be my guest. At least don't criticize when others do.

Re:Lets get some facts straight first.

[david.johns]

I don't have links off the top of my head. Let me google. (Also, I'm replying kinda to the top-level poster and also to the person directly above me.)

Ahah! Here it is. As you can see, there were some initial issues in the way that truetype was developed. Microsoft may provide the fonts free, but the original move to create truetype fonts in general was a point of contention between companies.

The only reason I point this out is that it shows that TrueType and Windows' anti-aliasing were developed to counter various strategic threats to Microsoft. I don't pick on Apple because if you read between the lines and the rest of the history, they were burned by some 'incompatibility' that was created by Microsoft.

Anyway - Microsoft isn't giving this away just because, and the original push for TrueType/Anti-aliasing was a major money sink for two companies. (Also, IP issues and development time made it unlinkely to end up in early Xfree, for instance - leading to the problems we've seen on free Unices.)

On the other hand, two implementations of bluetooth drivers for linux were available before even one for Windows. Should we then accuse Microsoft of being slackers when it comes to technology adoption? Turnabout is fair play.

Mozilla just keeps getting cooler.

[BgCntry]

No matter what gets said here about feature bloat and endless delays, Mozilla is just the coolest and most ambitious browser out there. At this rate it's well on its way to becoming the Emacs of the browser world, and it might even be there now. I've been using it as my main browser for god-knows-how-long. It's been fascinating to watch it evolve from the early milestone releases up to now.

Hell, Mozilla's never going to be finished, and I don't really care to see it finished either. I'd have to find a new religion.

Re:VERY exciting

[Otter]

From the HOWTO:
Now, edit your /etc/X11/XftConfig file, and add a line at the end. Most LCD screens will look better with R-G-B LCD Sub-Pixel Rendering. If yours does, add this line:

match edit rgba = rgb;

See, this is what I love and hate about Linux. The good news is someone hacked this up and someone else documented it and now Konqueror looks *sweet* on my TiBook.

The bad news is -- how the hell was I supposed to know to do this? I mean, besides reading every comment on Slashdot until someone posted a link. (Thank you, by the way, for two excellent links.)

Unfortunately ..

[Eloquence]

.. the screen-shot still shows the flaws of anti-aliasing under Linux. Take a look at the "k" in the "Bookmarks" text on the toolbar, or at the "W" in Wednesday -- this is what it actually looks like if you turn on anti-aliasing under KDE. Some fairly standard fonts just get really ugly and you have to search a long time until you have disabled all of them everywhere without removing them (webpages can probably still use them), or you have to disable anti-aliasing entirely at certain font sizes (haven't figured out how to do that yet, but haven't really looked either, KDE doesn't seem to have an option for it at least, but somewhere in the mess that is X configuration I'm sure it's possible).

Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).

Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while

[daserver]

Gdkxft is a very dirty hack. I really hope this new patch is going to be included in mozilla since this a point where it's lagging behind konqueror. Right now I use truetype fonts from m$ and they work just fine. Would be nice to try the new patch though :)

Re:Too bad Recall doesn't work right now

[SmileyBen]

Sure - but wait for the APIs to stabilize and everything to get sorted by 1.0, and then mozdev-type projects will properly take off!