Slashdot Mirror
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.
the first link autocloses the window...
And am I the only one that thought "Wow, Blizzard stopped coding for WarCraft 3 to help Mozilla out?!?"
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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!
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.
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.)
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.
Look here. This is with the version of mozilla included in Debian unstable, patched to work with the gdkxft hack. The real question is will this new patch actually be included in any commonly distributed Mozilla binaries. Because if it isn't, I don't think many are going to recompile the whole damn thing just for anti-aliasing (but that won't stop people from complaining about the lack of it!).
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
--
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).
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", "10");
h ic al", false);
e d_ support", true);
o ns -per-proxy", 24);
o ns -per-server", 12);
:).
of course most cool award goes to:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
(no popups onload from javascript but clicked popups still work)
also good:
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 128);
user_pref("network.huser_pref("mail.quoted_grap
user_pref("mail.display_glyph", true);
user_pref("mail.quoteasblock", true);
user_pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", true);
user_pref("mailnews.display.disable_format_flow
user_pref("mail.display_struct", true);
user_pref("mail.send_struct", false);ttp.max-connections-per-server", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connecti
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connecti
On *nix go to ~/.mozilla/default/something_random/ and edit prefs.js - note, copy it to prefs.js.new, edit it, close mozilla, copy it over prefs.js, restart mozilla, tada (if you edit it while moz is open it'll kill your new prefs.js version because it writes it out on exit or something).
Under Windows go to \Documents and Settings\ to your directory (make sure you have "show all files" in the folder prefs) and you'll find it. Or use that search feature
I'm assuming that 'LCD optimizations' refers to antialiasing using specific units in a triad, as has been discussed here a long while ago (with regards to a technology from Microsoft known as 'ClearType', I think -- the only original idea I've ever heard of from Microsoft).
If I remember correctly, it makes use of the concept that every pixel in a LCD display is made up of a red element, a green element, and a blue element, smooshed together horizontally. So if you antialias black-on-white text by breaking down each pixel into thirds like this, you can get much finer results than if you treated each pixel as an indivisible element. Each character antialiased in this way will be faintly edged with blue on the left and red on the right, but it's not noticeable to a casual user.
I could be completely misinterpreting the meaning of 'LCD optimizations,' though.
This won't help the end-user much, but it is a huge deal because it removes the main impediment stopping all programs from immediatly switching to xft.
Normally when somebody makes an "extension" to an existing interface they write it so you cannot use the "extension" without also updating what you are talking to. This means that anybody writing a program using the new interface either has to say "you have to update your drivers" which is user-unfriendly, or they have to put in a big mess of code to "detect" the extension and then have to write two interfaces, one using the extension and one not. The real result is almost nobody uses the extension because it it too much of a pain to write to.
X is horrid with these things. Shared memory images (an interface now 15 years old) required you to detect whether the server did it and write totally different code for non-shared. The result is that the majority of programs don't use shared memory images. If they had written the detection and emulation into it, I'm sure *EVERY* program would use shared images today.
Congrats to Keith Packard for figuring this out!
Now lets see the same thing done for the rest of XRender, so we can get anti-aliased lines and shapes without having to write everything twice.
match any pixelsize > 8 any pixelsize < 15 edit antialias = false;
This goes into ~/.xftconfig or into /etc/X11/XftConfig.
I'd really refrain from editing the prefs.js file directly. Instead, just create a file in the same directory called user.js and store your custom preferences there. user.js is parsed after prefs.js , and is not modified by the GUI when you alter preferences, so if you mess up it's much easier to fix. (And, conversely, you're guaranteed that the GUI won't mess it up for you.)
I can understand that X fonts originally were simple bitmaps that got rendered directly to the screen. But the X server knows what kind of visual is being rendered to, so I don't see why it can't render in a more sophisticated manner when drawing to a visual with at least 16 bits worth of color depth.
Were the original designers of the font rendering mechanism so braindead as to specify that all fonts forevermore would be bitmaps??? What the hell for???
As for the X font protocol, that's easy: design an upgraded protocol that the X server can also deal with, that's used to transmit font information along with transparency information. Or use a separate channel for the transparency information and keep the bitmap protocol the way it is.
But either way, font rendering belongs in the server, and having the client do it is complete nonsense.
I mean, the GC is an opaque data type, as is the Font, right? So what's to prevent you from having a mask with a depth greater than 1, which is created when you use XSetFont() with a font that has alpha information?
Help! I don't understand!!
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
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!
Um, MacOS >= 8.5 has supported antialiasing by default since 1998, and there was defacto support even earlier than that in Adobe Type Manager 3.x and up, IIRC. The CoreGraphics (Quartz) antialiasing in OSX is visually far superior to what was available in Classic, but AA in general certainly not a Johnny-come-lately feature on Apple's platforms.