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

Re:what is this feature.. is it those nice fonts?

[Jace of Fuse!]

And does windows already have this...

Font Smoothing has been available to Windows since at least OSR2 (or Win95 with Plus). ClearType further extend this in Windows XP, and it looks REALLY nice.

X11 as others have pointed out, does in fact have support for font antialiasing. For whatever reason, Mozilla apparently needed a patch in order to take advantage of it. I'm not too sure what the technical reasons are that all applications don't just automatically take advantage of it -- but I'm sure there are people who would be willing to clearify that.