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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."
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.
You obviously haven't experienced ClearType first hand.
MS has a checkbox on a website that enables ClearType instantly.
The difference on my CRT is nothing short of amazing.
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)
Sorry clown. I am right. I did NOTHING to my system EXCEPT change the libXft.so.1.1 file as per the instructions. It totally dicked up the rendering, making it look HORRIBLE. I don't give a f*ck for how Gnome does aa, I don't use it. I would assume that if it dicks up KDE aa, and Gnome uses the same method, then it will also dick up Gnome rendering too.
You don't like FACTS that your problem. I reported a deadass fact. You have to learn to live with reality. Really. You do.
Matter of fact, I tried it TWICE. Independent attempts. Font rendering went UGLY each time I used the xft hacked lib vs the unaltered. Fact. Live with it.
Care for a frickin' screenshot buttf*ck?
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