Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering

Posted by timothy on from the two-lines-of-code dept.

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."

9 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Thats cool; by SkulkCU · · Score: 0, Funny


    and by cool, I mean totally smooth.

    (groan)

    --
    .sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
  2. Breaks out in song... by CaptCanuk · · Score: 3, Funny

    I can see clearly now the fonts are antialiased...
    I can see all webpages, in my way...

    --
    ---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
  3. Re:Steve Gibson debunks M$'s "innovation" by idealego · · Score: 2, Funny

    http://grcsucks.com/

  4. Font antialiasing is a crutch by Proc6 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  5. Re:that's something completely different by nzhavok · · Score: 2, Funny

    OK that has to be the most rediculous argument I've heard today: "if you want text that looks nice, get yourself a 150dpi or higher monitor". Ummm why? I'm using opera in windows XP at the moment and guess what the text looks great, if I reboot into linux and into non aliased fonts in Konqueror half the text I see will look like crap.

    You don't always have to throw hardware at a problem to solve it, that's MCSE thinking!

    --

    He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
  6. Bill for Font Renerding Improvements by squaretorus · · Score: 5, Funny

    $10,000

    Breakdown:
    Changing 2 lines of code = $1
    Knowing which 2 lines =$9,999

  7. Now THAT's intuitive!!! by Smallest · · Score: 1, Funny
    You just need to put match edit rgba=rgb; in XftConfig.

    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.
  8. Don't you mean... by Junta · · Score: 3, Funny

    that you take your glasses *off* to anti-alias fonts? :)

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  9. Re:Changing two lines of code is "hacking through" by dark_panda · · Score: 3, Funny

    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