Slashdot Mirror
Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering
Eugenia writes: "Font antialiasing first made its way to XFree through Qt/KDE only a year ago and GTK+/Gnome followed some time after. Even with the latest version of Freetype 2.08, which reportedly brings better quality, the result is still not up to par with the rendering quality found on some commercial OSes. David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this hack, at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results to Mac OS X's or Windows' rendering engines. Check the two brand-new screenshots ('before' and 'after') at his web page and notice the difference with your own eyes."
and by cool, I mean totally smooth.
(groan)
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
I can see clearly now the fonts are antialiased...
I can see all webpages, in my way...
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
I've been waiting for this for a long time!
Now...if I could convince someone to hack improved window placement so things would stay where I want them without me having to move them all the time, I'd be a happy camper.
Kickstart
The HTML is seriously broken on the xfthack page. Ugh.
(I was moded -1 Troll last time I said this, so lets see what happens now)
/. thread about AA Fonts and the lack there of in Linux at the time. This is really a great improvement and a much needed one at that. I just want to see this rolled into major releases and thus major distros and fast
When I was using X for an extended period of time due to my windows box being gone, the one thing that seriously bugged me were the fonts. I didnt know what was looking wrong with them until I saw a
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Soon, you'll hear the bitching, just like with OS X.
"Oh, man, this sucks, those fonts look blurry, God, I hate it..."
Then, they won't be able to live without it.
Good to see that someone's working on this. The QT/KDE Anti-Aliasing was shady at best -- no pun intended -- it always seemed to mess up my terminals... and the different fonts that could be used were severely limited.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
I get the feeling that there is still work to be done, though. If you have windows xp, it's worth turning on the ClearType setting in Display -> Appearance -> Effects. XP starts as anti-aliased, but ClearType brings an even greater level. Of course, if you haven't seen ClearType in action, it's hard to expect improvement from plain old win2k. But the font improvements shown above in XFree are amazing, like night and day, no more blocky p's and q's at the wrong font size, which will make a lot of happy people at non MSFT boxes. =)
....and already slahsdotted. Arrgh. Off to Google to look for a cached version.
Having worked with GOOD font rendering software (mainly for broadcast television) I can say that most gui renderers do a pretty horrible job.
It's not that they get the font shape wrong, or don't antialias correctly, it's that they don't allow for how people see things, and just antialias 'mathmatically correct'.
With the fonts we use for television character generaters, several seperate rendering passes are used to give:
1 - a solid and anti-aliased 'interior' to the font (this is 'normal' antialiasing)
2 - a perimeter or border to the font, in a slightly different colour/darkless level, to make the edge stand out
3 - a seperate rednering to the alpha channel to stop the font from 'blending' excessivly at the edges with the background (ie: a buffer zone).
This makes a MASSIVE difference to the quality of the fonts, especially on anything other than a solid colour background.
unfortunately, no OS as yet does this for it's screen display fonts, which is a pity, as it makes a BIG difference.
Having said that, I'm VERY happy that improvements are happening, as good font rendering makes a hugh difference to the effort required to read text.
What are you complaning about?
1) There are a lot of people who DO care about Linux.
2) Slashdot offers you to configure your filters so you can't see the Linux articles anymore.
Slashdot tries to please the group that do care about Linux, and the group that don't care about Linux by providing filters, and you're still bitching about it?
See ya.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone know if there are any plans to change the default icon set for KDE3? Perhaps to Ikons
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Check out this article. ClearType is just Microsoft's name for sub-pixel rendering, and it's been around for decades now.
How does changing two lines of code merit a frontpage story on slashdot?
Now color me crazy, but since when has attaining similar aesthetic content to Windows been considered a good thing? It hurts my eyes just to look at it. I long for the good old days without those fancy anti-aliased fonts, although Mac OS X is quite pleasurable to use.
monolinux that sound to much like an STD to me.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Changing two lines of code is news?
All i can say is that my fonts look better than those screenshots. But its probably because of the sub pixel rendering on my lcd screen.
all you have to do is add one line to your XftConfig
here is a howto:
http://jmason.org/howto/subpixel.html
Try reading anything at high speed using the worlds fastest reading font (Times, or Palotino) at Point 10 size (ten pixels high ave at 72 points per inch).
If you alias its harder to read at hihgh speed and can be easily proven in comprehension tests.
I maintain that its foolish to use at points less than 24.
It has no place in our world.
Its messing up the usefulness of computers, and slowing them down, (no waY to "Or" a cached glyph over a colored backdrop easily if backdrop not one simple color).
If you doubt that 10 is crappy try 6 point.
At 6 point, a hinted type-1 adobe font is readable and learnable, and high speed undertandable especially on a flat screen.
Try that after asinine anti-aliasing the 6 point font. UGH.
Heres the real knee slapper... a CAPITAL T with straight vertical and horizontal edges is invariably aliased to make the edges fuzzy for no goddamned useful reason whatsoever other than hypocrisy or ignorance.
Why fuzz up hyphens and straight 'T's
I set AntiAliasing off in every tool I use if I cannot set it to only kick in after point 24 size.
Off is better than on.
Whats next... traslucent words on translucent backgrounds over rippled textures and muted low contrasting colors... great.
what a crappy world.
Did YOU ever do anything so simple who's outcome was so useful? No, of course not. Otherwise you wouldn't be so damn pissed about it. Two lines of code it may be, but the results are what got people talking about it, and in the end that's all that matters. Except to people like you, of course.
Seems like a simple hack. I wonder how many other simple hacks are just waiting for someone to come along and fix the little bits of nastiness in Linux? One down, many to go, and thank you from someone who stares at ugly fonts all day long.
(half off-topic, I know).
It's like the text is always too small, too large, or not the one the developer intended.
Not to troll, but this is exactly the kind of thing that has much more effect than technical people believe.
Is it something in the design? The freely available fonts?
It doesn't seem to display correctly in ns4. I had to use "view source" in order to read any of the text and get the url of the pictures. Probably you need to double check your table html.
Thanks for the mirror though!
I love Kimmy!
Actually, that is a truly elegant hack. The ideal hack is a simple (read elegant) solution to a problem. He managed to massively improve X's text antialiasing by changing a mere two lines of code. Impressive.
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
Maybe you need to ditch your shitty browser.
Here's another mirror. Sorry about those stupid ads.
I also want emphasize one thing that I say on the website. I can't take a whole lot of credit for the improvement. For sure, the freetype project and Keith Packard, author of XRender and Xft did all of the hard work. I just tweaked a few settings (adjusted glyph proportions and turned off hinting).
David Chester
Ah, how intuitive... how many hours of reading manpages, HOWTOs and FAQs did it take to figure that one out?
Goddammit. This is what I really hate in Linux. You have to read tons of obsolete and badly written documentation until you can turn on something as trivial as sub-pixel rendering.
Linux distributions need to agree on a configuration standard for the kernel and X and build a common GUI for it. Unless you enjoy tweaking your computer for hours and hours instead of getting something productive done at work, the current state of affairs is just unacceptable.
-October_30th (posting AC because of an IP ban)
it might just be a typical "ignorance is bliss" situation on my side, but if this effect was largely achieved by disabling the (apparently buggy) hinting support in freetype, why did they enable it in the first place?
i'm not trying to insult the freetype guys, they've done great work to make X look nicer, but this hack would probably not exist if they would have disabled hinting by default.
the screenshots do look okay, but are still somewhat blurry. i actually prefer not using antialiasing below 10pt anyway, the fonts quickly become unreadable. but that IMHO of course.
I'm really not trying to troll here but anti-aliased text has always looked fuzzy to me. In the screen shots, for example, the spacing and sizing of the AA text is certainly nicer but the default text seems shaper and crisper. Am I wrong here? Joel Spolsky agrees with me but everyone else seems so excited about AA text that I have to wonder if I'm missing something.
Quoted from the mosaicii page: "To be clear, I changed only two lines of code. Essentially, I disabled a process that the freetype library uses called 'hinting'."
Jealous or not, this is not what i would call a hack. IMO the man deserves credit indeed for pointing out a problem with xft, but a hack, no i dont see that either. Makes me wonder how the xft guys testet their stuff, but hey, i'm only jealous.
And I guess You are using Galeon, Mozilla or Konqueror. Wow, you are so cool. Unfortunately they don't display some IE-only sites pretty well. So you also have to ditch YOUR shitty browser.
Go troll somewhere else
Two lines or two thousand lines, if it fixes an issue that's a pain the the @$$, and if the slashdot community is interested to know, then it's worth posting on slashdot.
Don't quote me on this.
I really like the olds fonts better. They look sharper and darker, but don't got jacky edges.
:)
I have thought of this as long as there have been antialiased in gnome. And everytime I am on a windows machine i feel the antialising is much blurrier.
This hack make it look eksaclty like in windows, so it hasn't been me that has been halucinating all this time
It is clearly that hinting doesn do a really bad job at the moment. But antialising should make edges smoother, not blur the font out.
I really hope developers see font's the same way as I do, or at least give me a choice of different antialising methods in linux.
Why can't people see the real answer is just to develop ultra high resolution displays finer than the resolution of the human eye, then we can just make razor sharp fonts like a high quality laser printer. :) Okay, so we'd need a 4gig GeForce20 Ultra, but it would look 3R33T.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Anti-aliasing for computer displays is overrated anyway. Whether it helps or hurts readability depends on the font and font size, and on high resolution displays it is pointless. Printed matter isn't anti-aliased either, and printed matter is the gold standard for good looking text.
So, if you want text that looks nice, get yourself a 150dpi or higher monitor and don't bother with anti-aliasing. Anything else is a kludge.
XFree86 4 supports sub-pixel anti-aliasing (aka ClearType). You just need to put match edit rgba=rgb; in XftConfig.
Be patient. Keith Packard is pretty well done with his design and implementation of a new font selection configuration mechanism currently known as "fontconfig". Fontconfig separates the font selection from the rest of Xft, allowing other applications such as printer drivers to select fonts using the same mechanism and policy as X applications.
In the process, fontconfig replaces the arcane Xft configuration language with an XML DTD. This should allow easier hand-editing of this configuration. More importantly, it should allow GUI toolkits such as KDE and Gnome to easily put a GUI interface on font selection configuration. Hopefully, in a few months you'll be able to just click a button to get sub-pixel font rendering with Xft.
This really isn't meant to be a flame.
This seems to me to be a technology of limited use. Even at high screen resolutions almost all text is rendered at 12 pt, at which size anti-aliasing is more or less worthless.
It makes title bars look pretty. It makes big text on web pages look pretty. But for 99% of the text you see, it doesn't do much.
I don't want to discount the effort. I mean, if this program is as good as the screenshots suggest, then excellent job. (I haven't been able to test it out myself yet)
I guess I'm just not used to the modern computing era when it really is possible to throw in everything and the kitchen sink. I've gotta keep reminding myself that if something takes up an extra meg of Ram/swap and thirty megs of drivespace, that really doesn't matter. All of my instincts are still roughly in the 486 era, and I still think "why?" at every feature.
I just think at this point, the opensource community needs to give up its right to accuse others of bloatware. Bloatware is the modern standard, and if we don't embrace it, we look feature-poor. But Linux in the form that nearly everyone sees it and uses it today is bloatware. Well designed bloatware, for the most part, but bloatware nontheless.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Do you think he got inspired by god and changed those two lines. There must be background work where he did all the tests and research about this.
An analogy from mathematics is about how mathematicians come up with proofs to theorems. They first come up with a theorem which is a solution to a problem hoping their guess (or guesses) are correct. Then starting with the solution, step by step try to prove back to the original problem. Once they come up with a solution, it is probably 10 pages long and pretty ugly. Then they start refining the proof. At the end you have 3 lines of proof, which makes you think "How did this guy come up with this cute proof?".
A truly elegant hack? He TURNED OFF a broken feature!
Look, I think it's good that he fixed it, and I'm all for him publishing these changes, but a front page story on slashdot?? Please.
that's just moronic....think about it ..... lol
The sum on the mirrored copy referenced above matched as of ten minutes ago. (00:30 PST)
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
Why isn't font rendering done properly in the X server itself, where font rendering originally was done? Why must it be done client side?
I mean, the X server already knows what kind of visual you're trying to render to, so it's really just a question of getting the X server to pick up the necessary font information (transparency information at the edges of the letters if you insist on the X server itself not understanding how to render fonts). And the types used for the font rendering calls are all opaque anyway, so it shouldn't matter whether or not the font structure in the GC (on the server) stores additional information about the font being rendered, right?
All it would take in addition to the improved font rendering code in the X server is the definition of a new font server protocol that allows the transmission of more than just bitmap information to the X server from the font server and you'd be done, right?
So why isn't this being done instead of these client-side hacks that require magic rendering extensions (which are quite cool in and of themselves, but why should the client have to have a full set of fonts stored locally in order to do antialiased text?) ? The biggest advantage of this scheme by far is that you don't have to have any magic support for antialiased fonts in your toolkits: you get antialiased fonts for everything no matter what toolkit it's using (even Athena widgets would have antialiased text if the antialiased font rendering were done entirely server-side).
Or is this already what's being done, but I somehow missed it?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
This is not only a problem with Netscape. The HTML code of the page is broken: there is a <table> tag at the beginning of the page and it is never closed. The table structure is incorrect anyway, because the <table> tag is immediately followed by <td> without a <tr>. The same problem occurs for a <center> tag and a <font> tag that are never closed (besides, the <font> tag occurs just before a block-level <h2> tag, so it should have no effect). Also, all color specifications are incorrect: missing quotes, missing "#" sign before the hex values.
MrP-, if you are mirroring this slashdotted page, it would be a public service to fix the most obvious errors so that the mirrored page can be viewed by most browsers and passes at least some minimal HTML validation tests. The easiest way to fix the problem would be to remove the offending tags (2nd, 3rd and 4th line in the original page).
I highly recommend checking the page with HTML Tidy or with the W3C validator.
-Raphaël
Computer text is usually rendered onto a solid color
Usually. What about when it isn't?
and displayed on a high-quality, high-bandwidth device. That has almost nothing to do with rendering text for overlay onto a pictorial background and display on a low-pass, noisy device like broadcast television. Rendering text for GUIs the way you render it for television would be like slapping people in the face to get their attention and just would drive them crazy.
Yes, they wouldn't be able to deal with the fact the the text doesn't look butt-ugly as usual.
Anti-aliasing for computer displays is overrated anyway. Whether it helps or hurts readability depends on the font and font size, and on high resolution displays it is pointless. Printed matter isn't anti-aliased either, and printed matter is the gold standard for good looking text.
Bzzzt. Printing is analog, it's naturally anti-aliased.
So, if you want text that looks nice, get yourself a 150dpi or higher monitor and don't bother with anti-aliasing. Anything else is a kludge
Think about anti-aliased text on a 150 dpi monitor. Or, no, first find out what anti-aliasing is.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Speak to me. McGill? Dear God NO!!!. It's been /.'d.
At least he provided a mirror. Since you took all that time to figure out what the problems were why don't you do a public service and provide a mirror? Or possibly even email MrP there your fixes.
Otherwise don't whine.
Down at the bottom of the page, he shows his older method which was individually optomized for a particular font (he chose Times New Roman), and which he later abandoned. So yes, he explored at least one entire line of thought before abandoning it and apply what he had learned from that.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
oh man... at least he took the time to check exactly what was wrong in the page. he even explained how to fix it easily. and maybe he also emailed MrP. maybe it is not easy for him to set up another mirror. how do you know? who is whining here?
On the contrary...
If there is a browser that you got a chance to see an IE only web site is Konqueror on KDE 3.0 - it got the most compatible with MSIE javascript and rendering techniques...
Hetz (Heunique)
This guy just disabled hinting and adjusted the rendering resolution to his liking.
Without hinting, fonts will never look as good as they do on MS Windows or OS X.
Messing with the rendering resolution to make certain fonts look a little bit better seems to be the kind of hacking a chicken without a head could do.
This is not the ueberhack slashdot makes it out to be. This is not news.
regards,
Johan V.
Uh, actually virtually all CRTs are analog too. (Old CGA displays don't really matter much these days, though...) Or did you think the signal coming out of that 15-pin d-sub VGA connector was digital? Surprise, it isn't. Not to mention that some of the electrons meant to bombard phosphorescent element n tends to go astray a bit and bleed into adjascent phosphorescent elements. The results of this can be seen quite dramatically on low-quality CRTs at high resolutions.
In other words, paper is really no less digital than a CRT is. Just as a 640x480 image looks kinda blocky taking up your whole CRT, it looks just as blocky taking up a whole sheet of paper. It's paper's virtue of being able to handle insanely high resolutions that makes it suitable for "displaying" really clear graphics and text. I can't think of a single reason that a CRT oughtn't be able to do the same one day. Anti-aliasing is simply a stop-gap technology until that day arrives, IMHO.
Personally, if I had the option, I'd go for a 150 DPI (or better, actually 300 DPI would make me happy) display over something that only does, say, 1280x1024 with antialiasing. I'd much rather talk about picas and points than pixels. Pixels suck; they're the cause of too much geek envy. (Admit it! When you were still stuck with an 800x600 display you were drooling when your rich friend upgraded to a 20" display that could do a whopping 1600x1200.)
Yep... Jealous. Sad really.
I quote 'Bistromat': "and in fact there are makefile flags to compile it without hinting enabled"
So at least one source code change was completely unnecessary.
Johan V.
Well, maybe that's what they tell the arts majors. However, the term "aliasing" actually refers to what happens when you try to exceed the Nyquist limit: different frequencies are "aliased" together. Anti-aliasing removes that by band-limiting the signal in some way prior to sampling. When you print with toner on paper, there is nothing band-limited about the resulting image: the toner/paper transition has very high contrast edges at just about any resolution you care to look and those result in very high frequency components in the image.
the fact the the text doesn't look butt-ugly as usual.
You demonstrate a common occupational hazard for people working in graphics: you prefer style over function.
Think about anti-aliased text on a 150 dpi monitor.
For most monitors, you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. And for a high-resolution monitor designed to display text, you make the display worse if you try to anti-alias.
Usually. What about when it isn't?
If you composite onto an image, the text needs to undergo the same filtering as the the image has undergone or it will look unnatural. In the case of compositing text into television images, there happens to be a single answer because, by convention, television cameras try to degrade the image in roughly the same traditional way. For digital images you find on computers, the filter could be anything.
Well, that's the price we gladly pay for having a user-friendly and easy to learn GUI and operating system.
It's wrong to claim that linux is more secure than windows. The reason why "exploits" are constantly being found in Windows and IE is because so many people are actually using them! How was it? "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"? Bugs being shallow means that they're found.
Now, the open source operating systems and browsers might appear more secure but that's only because a) they are difficult to use and thus tend not to be targetted by the least skillful hackers and b) only a miniscule number of computer users are using linux and alternative browsers. The latter fact means that no-one's really that interested in hacking into such a system? Where's the eliteness in that?
Nice troll. But to get past the FUD
1) Linux is far faster growing than MS. But then, you know this as you work for MS.
2) Linux's server numbers are 2x higher than MS's or about 1/2 of MS's depending on whose numbers you look at. Assuming that MS is 50% and Linux is 30% (I doubt these, but...) then MS's crack account should be about 50%. Yet it is >90% of all openings on the web. Also, MS accounts for >98% of all credit cards stolen from the web. Personally, I feel much safer giving my CC to a box running some unix via http rather a MS system running https.
But hey, that is what FUD is all about. eh?
Ikons will be in 3.0. Crystal-icons will be in 3.1. Check out the screenshot from lates KDE Kernel Cousin: http://kt.zork.net/kde/kde20020301_34.html )
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Those high-res printers you speak of, still use anti-aliasing.......
Johan V.
It is amazing what MS can do with Stolen ideas from apple (an dother companies).
JavaScript Instructions to get rid of Ads.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Regardless, it works.
The incredible quantity of design that went into X still produces an end result which causes the uninitiated to say "it's way too complex, and it just plain sucks."
Of course, then we explain that it doesn't suck, and that it's based on a perfectly sound architecture, and that it's really a work of beauty.
None of that changes the fact that it sucks.
The fonts look better with this (ugly) hack. Much, much better. This is the Sistine Chapel of two-line hacks.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Now, what kind of a way to talk to your fellow -1, Troll is that, you goatbanging shitbrick?
Oh, please. This troll was limp and flaccid. The only response it provoked was your ha-ha-aren't-I-so-funny "Troll Library" reply. Have you forgotten the meaning of the word "Troll", you walnut-brained fuckwit?
Maybe it's because I'm using subpixel rendering
on my LCD screen right now, but the 'after' images
look much worse than the regular XFT rendering to
me.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
Actually changing only two lines of code to get such improvements does merit a frontpage story.
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
That people notice when they switch over from Microsoft products, Apple products, etc.
People are smart, they can adapt to these newfangled ideas like shading windows.
People also have taste - and dislike ugliness.
Way to go - antialiased fonts r0x0r.
Does anyone know if there's a way (and how) to make Flash animations start _always_ at low quality (i.e., no anti-aliasing)?
:-) and I have to constantly do it by hand, which is a PITA.
My machine is weak
Of course I could uninstall Flash (not out of question), but still... Any ideas?
So in place of using configuration files that I can analyze, modify and distribute in an automatic fashion you suggest that it is better to find out a little checkbox somehwere in the middle of who knows how many tabs, sub-menus and other check-boxes, all this sometimes hidden behind one or two buttons and that make the change undistributable (unless you understand the registry, and sometimes not even then).
Yeah, GUIs are very intuitive and easy to use.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If it really is that simple, why had nobody tried it before?
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
So is this similar to ClearType that comes with Windows XP?
I belong to the ______ generation.
Fact 1: Hinting improves font legibility at smaller sizes.
Fact 2: Freetype doesn't interpret the bytecodes in the fonts that are needed for proper hinting because of patents detained by Apple.
Fact 3: It uses an alternative bytecode "guesser". People may or may not like it, even though it usually improves legibility. This Canadian dude (I have the right to use this term because I am myself a Canadian dude ;)) only disabled the bytecode "guesser" because he didn't like it. Fine.
Fact 4: Rather than disabling the bytecode "guesser", enable the patented bytecode interpreter. Remember, this is illegal if you live in the U.S. and haven't licenced the patents from Apple.
For your enjoyment, I've made RPMs for Mandrake 8.1 and Redhat 7.2 of the Freetype library with the patented bytecode interpreter enabled.
$10,000
Breakdown:
Changing 2 lines of code = $1
Knowing which 2 lines =$9,999
Anyone who has maintained a large codebase, or has made mods to someone else's code, knows this:
Sometimes hours and hours of work can result in very few lines of code. It reminds me of the carpenter's rule: "think twice, saw once". Sometimes a great deal of analysis yields more results than many lines of code.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
What I have done is taken a screenshot, loaded the hack, snapped another screenshot, then compared the two. The fonts after using the hack look proportionally better, as in they don't look like there are some bolder, some lighter, or some smaller on various characters. That's about the only good thing.
/. front page are about half the size, and there are little particles very slightly above the fonts, seemingly seperate from the font.
Other than that, the fonts look dreadfully blurred and faded. The courier font in black looks more like it's grey. Also, the smaller fonts are so blurred they're giving me a headache. For instance, the fonts on the right-side of the
KDE/Qt with XFree font aliasing without the hack looks a great deal better, if ya ask me. The problem is that some fonts look blotched, but atleast they're not giving me migranes trying to read them.
(8)-|-L /
Sometimes changing one single character is an admirable achievement. I don't know why I even bother saying this, it should be obvious: the amount of knowledge behind a certain code change is NOT proportional to the amount of change.
I have once waded through 20.000 lines of shellscript code because of a bug, which was a simple
if [ a=b ]
instead of the correct
if [ a = b ]
So, what I did was "simply" to add a blank after the "a" and one before the "b". Only two characters added, and still it made a nasty bug go away. And it wasn't at all easy to find, because of the surrounding code which masked hte bug pretty well, and even visually it's difficult to distinguish.
Sigged!
Ugh I know this is going to seem like extremely shallow commentary but...
Microsoft Word has better on-screen anti-aliasing than something like Adobe Photoshop. Lemme explain. Photoshop indiscriminately anti-aliases all curves, and it does it pretty well (even with a few variations, smooth, strong, etc). Microsoft Word (as well as all Microsoft products that use that engine) renders anti-aliased text as well but favors vertical and horizontal lines. That is, even if a font mathematically hangs over a vertical and deserves some kind of gray line, Word will keep a solid vertical line only (see Times New Roman, any capital letter at 72pt). What this does is accentuate the fact that the fonts are on screen, where the canvas natively has vertical and horizontal accents built in (a grid of pixels).
And about ClearType... I think it's for LCDs only (like laptops), so I've read. Instead of just treating the field of pixels as blocks of single color, (black text on white, two colors), the ClearType algorithm exploits the fact that pixels are actually three colors, red, blue, and green. So, instead of just using the font-color and background color (and everything in between) to render smooth fonts (that is, black, white, all shades of gray), ClearType uses shades of blue and orange when using white and black, to help apply the smoothing factor to those RGB "pixels" within pixels. I've tried it on my CRT and it doesn't do anything for me, but then again, it wasn't meant to.
If you've ever worked with print or web design, you know jaggies look extremely ugly and unprofessional. If you look at a website like Apple's, you wouldn't give jaggies a second thought because all of their material is well-rendered and well-anti-aliased. All those little pixels make a big difference in the overall presentation of something. If you want to see ugly, try looking at a nice Flash presentation in LOW mode. That will turn off all anti-aliasing. It looks horrible.
But I don't get it, why would you say something is rotten? Microsoft and Freetype look like they're doing a pretty good job.
Just tried it on debian/unstable, and I can only choose 4 fonts when enabling AA in KDE. All 4 of them are fixed size, and look _horrible_. I can't load the "freetype" module because of some version conflict thing. Anybody knows what the problem is ?
Marko No. 5
"It's wrong to claim that linux is more secure than windows."
Eh? When did I mention Linux?
"posting as an AC because of a IP ban"
No, you're posting AC because you're trolling.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Check out this page which I just threw up. It shows the difference at the pixel level between ClearType and this guys hack.
You can see that ClearType isn't just using grays, it's using other colors... presumably that will only make a difference on LCDs. But you can see quite clearly that ClearType is trying to get full pixels whenever it can. Look at the second leg of the 'n'... it's a gray blob with the XFree hack, but Cleartype has a solid black line.
-Erik
Sometimes I wish instead of cleartype that Microsoft advertized 3 years ago it was 3D graphics or something because even though there seems to be more to life than font rendering, most people don't know what's important without Microsoft to lead the way. Now that we have to spend our existances getting the absolute best approximation to cleartype it's like Microsoft advertizes exactly what doesn't matter so their competition doesn't beat them at what does matter.
The HTML is pretty bad and won't render under Netscape. Anyone care to fix it up for the lazy ones of us who are too lazy to search through the source for the images?
Josh Woodward
I'm just learning shell scripting, so I have no idea what changing that statement does. Could you elaborate briefly?
Well, I must say that at larger sizes, I much prefer the original `hinted' text, since it shows up much darker on my display. However, the non-hinted text seems to be much more legible at smaller sizes, and it definitely scales much more cleanly (no jumping from everything being ~1 pixel wide to everything being ~2 pixels).
If the non-hinted text could be made darker, that would be great! Of course, I hear that the hinting engine is getting better and better, so who knows what will be the best a year from now..
wow. not only is it buried in some friggin configuration file (how many does X have? is this the one where i get to set the monitor scan frequency? that one's my favorite!), but the option doesn't look anything like what we're trying to use it for. yay!
incredible.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I think the X server uses the FreeType library not the client application. XFree86 can load a module named "libfreetype.a" (usually in lib/modules/fonts dir) that does the rendering on server side.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
If you want to accomplish something similar, before compiling freetye, look at line 435 of include/freetype/config/ftoption.h in the source distribution before compiling. That disables the hinter. I'm not if this is as effective as what the guy did to the Xft library. I don't have the orginal source files at the moment, so I can't tell exactly what he changed. I also can use his libXft.
Another option is to realize that the hint guessing that freetype does to avoid patent infringement problems by default can be changed to use a bytecode interpreter that does proper hinting of TrueType fonts, Change line 378 of the above mentioned file for this to occur. I still don't understand how making the code "optional" makes it any less patent infringing..
Of course, no matter how you configure freetype, it will still look like crap without good fonts.
http://www.linuxquebec.com/~nomis80/ has a script to automate installation of Microsoft true type fonts.
Of course by enabling the bytecode interpreter and *possibly* by getting MS fonts without a MS OS, you may be doing illegal stuff, but if pretty fonts under X is outlawed, then only outlaws will have pretty fonts under X, or something like that....
Disabling hinting with the default fonts is probably the most legal way to go, but what is the fun in that?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I am running my stuff on 1280x1024 screens and, quite frankly, the purported improvements from anti-aliasing fail to make any impression (yes, I am positive my anti-aliasing setup is correct.) Even the pictures submitted as examples of its wonders look most underwhelming on my displays.
Which makes me think: Is anti-aliasing little more than just another fad in an industry largely run by fads?
You have precisely described my biggest issue with anti-aliased fonts, especially with Xfree86. First off, there can be little arguement to the fact that the non-TrueType fonts that are used by Xfree86 are horrible to look at.
I was initially very gratefull for the introduction of anti-aliasing in Xfree86. At first glance it looked SO much better than before, as does this new hack. But, I quickly found that the mild blurring and gray scaling that anti-aliasing performs, makes the text mildly fuzzy. This fuzziness causes pronounced eye fatigue after a couple of hours.
The reason fuzziness is a problem, and the solution as you described in your post, is a border. By bordering the text it increases the sharpness and contrast of the text there by making it far easier on the eyes. Without the borders anti-aliasing looks great at first glance but, is still almost as fatiguing as the jaggies.
The thing that I find most interesting though, is that True Type fonts are the best of all, even/especially on XFree86.
Just put my glasses on, and...
voila!
automatically antialiased fonts :-)
Is there a way to make anti-aliasing done by the hardware?? I mean, today we have GeForces that alone are more powerfull than many older computers and when Im typing on a word processor its power is not used at all. :/
I dont know if its possible but knowing font anti-aliasing is that resource consuming it would be a good idea! :)
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
that you take your glasses *off* to anti-alias fonts? :)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The only AA font system I have ever liked, is the old RiscOS AA. It rendered the font very well. They where clear, (MS AA is worse), precise, (RiscOS used 'sub-pixel AA, which made different looking characters pixel-wise, but looked the same on screen. Just type 'iiiiiiiiiiiiii' in the Times font into Word/Mozilla) and it was very configurable; Anti-alising, hinting etc. could all be set by the user. The MacOS X fonts look similar, but I still have to see them in action.
Bring back RiscOS!! It did full display antialiasing over 15 years ago... Looked great on CGA displays, wasn't bloatware and ran on a 486 equivalent processor without much trouble.
moog
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Those patents are kinda hard to read. Maybe them should have used the hinting technology to print it ;-)
There seem to be a lot of anti-aliasing rules/s*cks opinions. Anti-aliasing comes in many different qualities. The very article that started this thread proves that.
There's bad anti-aliasing which looks crap and there's the really good stuff which is generally based on sub pixel rendering.
"Printed matter isn't anti-aliased either, and printed matter is the gold standard for good looking text."
Well, yes, printed matter is beautiful -- but it's usually vectored up on laser printers so that the characters are perfect. Can your monitor do this? Unless you own a miracle screen, the text on it is comparable to something printed off a dot-matrix. Hence the need for aa.
People in the XFree project may already be considering this, but antialiased objects look much better when you take into consideration that a gray ramp that is perceptually linear is not optically (luminously?) linear.
To be specific, imagine you're drawing an antialiased line, and you have come to a point where the line covers 50% of two adjacent pixels, so you decided to paint them both with 0x7f. The problem there is that a pixel that looks like 50% gray is actually emitting 18% as much light as a full-on pixel, so when you put the two 18% pixels together, they add up to 36% instead of 100%. The result is that a thin antialiased line will appear to get darker and lighter along its length. If you were to take this into account, it might improve antialiased text further.
The function to apply to all pixels is this, where x is a number from 0 to 255 representing the brightness you WANT to get, and y is what you have to plot:
y = (int)(255.0 * pow(x/255.0, 1/2.5) + 0.5)
The +0.5 rounding factor in there may not affect much.
I believe it was a Dr. Poynton who talked at length about this in the 1998 Siggraph.
Thanks.
It looks to me like disabling hinting does look much better at low resolutions (8-10pt) but worse at higher resolutions. Maybe he should turn the hinting code on or off depending on the resolution?
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
You want Linux to blow away Windows on the desktop? Then get your heads out of your butts, and put in the time and effort to find out what real users in the real world want from computers, and then make sure Linux gives it to them. Given the level of demand out in the mainstream for a better alternative to Windows, if Linux does this MS will implode faster than Enron.
I don't think any of this has to do with ClearType really. I think people are motivated by seeing how nice fonts look on other systems (including ClearType, but also Mac, and what Be had, etc...)
The bits that make ClearType above and beyond typical anti-aliasing are actually in the Xrender extension used by the AA font system, and that is subpixel operations (i.e. taking advantage of order of red, green, and blue elements in an LCD screen to effectivvely triple horizontal resolution). The key things needed are a) well-hinted fonts and b) good strategy for understanding and following those hints. a is easy to solve by downloading, say, MSs fontset. A more proper solution will eventually happen, but for now it works. b has caused some problems, as this little thing shows. The "auto-hinting" functionality where FreeType tries to guess the hints without actually interpreting them causes fonts to look worse than better, and in the end we are better off with no hinting than auto-hinting. The "proper" solution to hinting is in FreeType, a bytecode interpreter for the hints. The problem here is it is not a default because doing so would make Apple (who has a patent on reading and using those hints) angry. I posted already in this forum the "right" way of disabling hinting in freetype or enabling the better, but illegal bytecode interpreter....
A lot of the growing pains has more to do with Apple than it does with MS.... AA fonts look nice, even if they bring next to nothing to the table in terms of utility and usability, and I don't think the development needs the prodding of MS to seek out better eye-candy. If anything, MS is pushing more eye-candy (XP) because of prodding from Apple and X based eye-candy...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Red Hat 7.2 has inconsistent policies for its use of Freetype. The freetype library itself has bytecode interpretation disabled so installing your version will greatly enhance its quality. But the X server/xfs was built with bytecode interpretation enabled. This means you can also greatly enhance font rendering by not enabling antialiasing. If you use the core X server font rendering -- which is the default -- the font (if well hinted) will look good.
You are so right. Slashdot's standards are obviously falling. I mean, a year ago, a good hack took seven lines of code to merit frontpage news. Now it only takes two.
I predict the next great hack frontpage story to be "Linux in one really huge line of Perl".
J
I installed this library and the anti-aliasing improvement has been incredible. I highly suggest this to everyone who uses KDE with anti-aliasing. I'm very pleased!
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Freetype DOES interprete hinting, if you enable it by changing 5 characters in the source code.
Well, people, if the patent is not valid where you live, mainlya here in Europe, get these updated RPMS for SuSE I made. No guarantees, they work for me and the hinting works in them.
http://hippokrates.jura.uni-mannheim.de/
Moritz
It drops into debian unstable very nicely, but what then? I tried enabling the libgdkxft library using the GNOME-AA session via GDM, and the AA fonts looked nicer (I think). Is this what is needed? It doesn't make any change in the non-AA session...
The problem is that I think my XftConfig is messed up as the fonts displayed in the console (powershell) are ugly, leave remenants, etc.
Can anyone give a geek a hand?
I just gave it a try and I must say that it looks frickin' horrible compared to the aa done in KDE/QT. I had to back it out to make the aa fonts on my system look better and more readable. Looking at the xft-based aa fonts from the hack made me think my glasses prescription was f*cked or that I had scum in my eyes.
Nice try and all but until it can do it as well as QT, it isn't ready for primetime.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I just turned them on too, and it sucks. And it looks like linux version of openoffice.org with windows ttfs.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Ah, so blurry text is an "aesthetic result"?
"Anti-aliasing" just means blurring, and is in general not a good thing. And this particular hack turns off hinting, to make it every blurrier.
Like headaches? Install this.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So saying anything remotely positive about Windows, even when it is so blatantly obvious it stings, re the user-friendly GUI, is trolling?
Close to Mac OS X? Not by far. You trolls can stick with you hampered XFree for as long as you want. All I can say is that Quartz rocks! There is absolutely NO comparison. Quartz wins hand-over-fist.
when it comes down to it, HERE's an actual Mac OS9 screenshot to compare to the Xfree anti-aliasing. notice that OS9 doesn't anti-alias text below (user settable) 12 points (handy, and faster). i've set the browser font to be: Times-12 -> imo, after examining both the X shot and this shot at 400% magnification, it seems to me that the hinting and definition of the MacOS still yields clearer text. someone might also want to post up a OS-X and XP screenshot of the same web page: http://salon.com/ent/feature/2002/03/02/shakespear e/index.html
so we can have a REAL comparison of actual screenshots instead of a lot of /. theorizing about about the Nyquist limit.
regards,
johnrpenner.
when it comes down to it, HERE's an actual Mac OS9 screenshot to compare to the Xfree anti-aliasing.
notice that OS9 doesn't anti-alias text below (user settable) 12 points (handy, and faster). i've set the browser font to be: Times-12 -> imo, after examining both the X shot and this shot at 400% magnification, it seems to me that the hinting and definition of the MacOS still yields clearer text.
someone might also want to post up a OS-X and XP screenshot of the same web page:
http://salon.com/ent/feature/2002/03/02/shakespea
so we can have a REAL comparison of actual screenshots instead of a lot of
regards,
johnrpenner.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/soft/prman/Toolki t/AppNotes/appnote.25.html
Frequency clamping isn't the best or only way to deal with aliasing. Convolution is used too. Antialiasing is a big and scary field.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I have Windows XP using ClearType, and I'm using a CRT. Everything is nice and smooth
That's because XP's ClearType reverts to traditional high-quality anti-aliasing on displays whose color components aren't misaligned, such as CRTs. ClearType as we know it is a display technology designed to hop on the phase carrier created by the misalignment of the red, green, and blue planes of a typical color LCD panel to triple the apparent horizontal resolution.
More information is available here and here; free software to do ClearType processing on bitmap images is available here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I downloaded a hosts file that filters out spam and ad domains like doubleclick.com . It tells your computer to serve those addresses from your computer.
Because you don't have the resource files those advertisers do, it doesn't load ads.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Anti-aliasing removes that by band-limiting the signal in some way prior to sampling
You know, even though I took the related courses as an EE -- rather a long time ago -- I could never understand why people called these text-rendering techniques anti-aliasing: I mean, what the hell does prettying up the picture have to do with preventing frequency aliasing?
DUH! Text anti-aliasing techniques are just low-pass filters, which you would use to anti-alias a digital signal if you were interested in frequency analysis of the image.
Finally I get it. Thanks, markj02!
Although you maybe didn't need to be so smug about it.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
And while I'm at it, what are good fg and bg
colors for xterms?
quote the poster:
;)
... and they rose from the bold frigid north and engulfed their Southern neighbours with ferocity not seen since 1812!
still stuck on your Canadian inferiority complex??? whereas most canucks dwell on the states, down here we never even think about canada. as in never, ever. no one cares, get over it.
p.s. don't forget we outnumber you 10-1 in popluation if its a scrap you want
Fonts that are hinted for screen display shouldn't be anti-aliased at small sizes. It makes them blurry. The font author has already essentially laid out the pixels exactly as they should appear for those sizes. At least give people the choice. (Do you play anti-aliased NES games on your emulator, or do you leave the pixels as-is?)
Second, it would be nice to have "ClearType" (that is, sub-pixel AA) on linux, too. Is anyone working on this?
Huh? Konq is more compatible with IE than Moz? Riiight...
the ONLY reason why i use win xp has come to linux. F*CK WINDOWS.
GNOME and KDE use the *same stupid antialiasing* code. There is *no diference*. God, I hate idiots that use KDE and don't have a clue about how it actually works but like to insult GNOME.
The before column looked much better than the after column on my laptop. I didn't read the article, but I can tell that he's lessened the effects of the hinting (that makes lines center on pixels). The results of that sort of thing is text who's shape may be more accurate but who's sharpness is lacking.
It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find reading text with uncentered lines annoying on lcds where the pixels a so sharp. I suppose there might be a gamma issue too. The gamma matters more with uncentered lines than with centered ones, but, on a laptop the gamma changes with angle - and the angle with the best gamma might not be the one with the best contrast (blacks might be grey etc.).
Rocky J. Squirrel
This is great stuff, well done. It is also a perfect illustration of the dangers of using a misunderstood technology; hinting. Hinting was originally designed to help non antialiased fonts shift character vectors to align with discrete pixels for a more recognizable character description. It's application to antialiased fonts was foolish and never worked because the antialiasing is perfect for displaying the subpixel hint shifts being applied and makes the fonts look extremely ugly. Hinting on antialiased fonts was a complete misapplication of an earlier display kludge.
This work illustrates this perfectly. No need for debates, look at the images and learn. Well done and kudos for an awesome and simple piece of work.
XP's smooth font crap bugs the hell out of me it just looks like blurry text to me
http://Lenny.com
This work illustrates this perfectly. No need for debates, look at the images and learn. Well done and kudos for an awesome and simple piece of work.
Huh? I disagree completely. When combined with antialiasing, hinting improves the sharpness of characters (at the expense of precise shape). On a blurry monitor where you couldn't see the sharpness in the first place there's no point in hinting, but on an LCD the hinted font looks much better. The imprecision in the shape isn't so bad, because, at a given size, all characters will tend to be distored in the same way - keeping them consistent.
I get a little queasy staring at fonts where, for example, the left side of a lower case 'n' is a black line a single pixel wide and the right side is a 50% gray line, two pixels wide (etc. etc.). Sure the lines are equivalent if you have very bad eyes or a very blurry monitor, but they should look the same.
With hinting on both sides of the 'n' do look exactly the same. Another win here is that the previously mentioned double wide-50% gray line can ONLY look somewhat like the single wide black line if the gamma on your monitor is correct or you're looking at your LCD from exactly the right angle and if the program took gamma into account in the first place. The hinted font doesn't have that problem - both side of the 'n' will look perfectly the same from any angle, with any gamma etc. There's a real advantage there.
The original use of hinting, to make fonts look better at low resolutions works for antialiased fonts as well as for non-antialiased ones.
Rocky J. Squirrel
By the way, looking at the page again, I realize that I looked at the san-serif example and not the serif example...
The serifed font is badly hinted and turing hinting off is a good thing in that case. The san-serif font on the other hand looks better hinted.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I know it increases the sharpness of the characters, unfortunately the fools who implement this miss the point that to do so it moves the fonts by subpixel ammounts and when you mess this up it looks abominable.
I know the issues about subpixel positioning etc, I'm a graphics programmer and have been for about 15 years. I am gurrently working full time on image processing software.
The imprecision in the shape is awful and get's worse the smaller you go. GO look at the results instead of banging your sharpness drum. What good is sharpness if your edge is in the wrong place? This attempt to defeat Nyquist is an abomination and produces incorrect and ugly results, this has just been proven in spectacular fashion.
You could say that. I chose not to. Double negatives have been prescribed against only by relatively recent grammarians who sought to make english conform to the same rules as symbolic logic (similar to how the rules against the split infinitive are based on an erroneous analogy between english and latin).
But the fact is that the double negative has a long, illustrious use, going back to the very beginnings of Modern English (Shakespeare) and beyond (Chaucer). The nuns teaching grammar may have relegated this construct to informal use, but it's still widely used and universally understood. I have no remose for having used it.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I posted on this subject earlier, but I thought I would clarify some things, since what I provided was not sufficient for doing correct gamma correction on antialiasing. The basic issue is that a gray scale that appears to be linear to the human eye (perceptual brightness) is in fact not linear in how much light is produced for each brightness level (luminocity).
To summarize the issue that needs to be corrected for, consider a thin white antialiased line on a black background. At some point along the line, you will encounter two adjacent pixels which are each 50% brightness, because the line covers each pixel by 50%. It is not sufficient to plot two pixels next to each other which you perceive to be 50% brightness, since what you perceive to be 50% brightness is really 18% as much light as a 100% bright pixel. Therefore, when you put two 50% pixels together, you get 36% as much light as a single 100% bright pixel, making the line appear to get dark and light along its length.
To correct for this, the pixels to be plotted must be gamma corrected so that two 50% pixels together add up to 100%. To do this, set the pixel brightness (as a value from 0 to 1) to the power of 0.4, so to get two pixels to add up to 100%, you each pixel needs to be 76% (perceptually).
Unfortunately, what I have described only works for a black background. Even if you are not actually doing alpha blending, antialiasing must be done in such a way that what you are drawing appears to blend properly into its background. So if you assume a blue background and want to draw a red line, then you can compute a color scale which progresses from red to blue depending on how much of the line covers a pixel.
Since we are generally talking about drawing black text onto a white background, then the math changes. Simply setting the brightness you want to the power of 0.4 assumes a black background.
The solution is to convert the color spaces of both the foreground and background colors into luminance space, blend them, and then convert back to perceptually linear color space.
With antialiased lines, we can start with an assumption that each point that is plotted is a representation of how much of the foreground color we want to blend in. That is, rather than thinking of gray pixels in the antialiased text as gray pixels, consider the pixel value to represent how much black must be blended with white. This makes a subtle difference.
So we come to the full formula for blending foreground and background colors. In this formula:
B is the background color (perceptually linear).
F is the foreground color (for antialiased text, this is full black for ALL pixels to be plotted).
P is the percentage of the foreground to blend (you can compute this by taking a pixel from an antialiased glyph as you would have drawn it before (black fg, white bg) and subtracting it from 1.0).
V is the value of the pixel to actually plot to the screen.
V = pow(pow(F, 2.5)*P + pow(B, 2.5)*(1-P), 0.4)
In other words, convert F and B to luminance space, weight them by the blend factor, add them together, then convert the result back to perceptual space.
For white text on a black background, this reduces to [pow(P, 0.4)], which I had described earlier. For black text on a white background, this reduces to [pow(1-P, 0.4)] (where P here is how much black, not how much white).
I find that anti-aliased fonts are a real drag to try to read. I wish there was some way to shut off anti-aliasing in MacOS X. The anti-aliased fonts are more mathematically correct renderings of font glyphs represented mathematically, it's true, but they just look blurry to me.
It used to be that people would spend a lot of time hand-optimizing a font to look good on screen. This is definitely costly, and I can see why one would want to teach a computer to do it nicely, but anti-aliasing doesn't seem to be a good answer to me.
Am I crazy, or do other people have the same experience with anti-aliased fonts? I'm using MacOS X, by the way, and the output looks a lot like the "after" output in the article, so I don't think I can blame my problem on a bad anti-aliasing algorithm.
And of course the less than/less than equal example from the openssh security hole...
graspee
Well, that's more a border-type of bug. I actually hate those, even though this eval vs. assignment-bug was really nasty to find.
I hate border-type of bugs because it forces me to do way too much dry runs to iron the things out.
Sigged!
you know, dave, i heard that hacking for font improvements can increase your chance of getting TOS.
the physiotherapy sisterhood
So, how's Sacramento today?