The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

Still inferior by Drunken+Coward · 2003-03-28 06:53 · Score: 3, Informative

The font rendering system in Windows is still vastly superior to any free implementation. Fragmentation will only further this problem.

Competition is a good thing, but in this case collaboration is even better. The more situations we have like this, the longer it will take for Linux to be ready for the desktop.

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Re:Still inferior by Fnkmaster · 2003-03-28 07:08 · Score: 5, Informative

This isn't quite so true anymore. The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. At least, when it's using _good_ True Type fonts, anti-aliasing, hinting, and so forth enabled in FreeType. I've seen some intermittent kerning problems in slightly older versions of FreeType (like in Mandrake 9), but these appear to be largely resolved now. For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.

That being said, there is still a mess behind the scenes with font rendering. These non-TrueType legacy fonts sitting around should just go away. The frustration that sometimes, mystically, some fonts get anti-aliased and some don't - this isn't something end-users should have to deal with (and to the credit of the Mandrake people, I haven't yet seen any of these problems with the default fontconfig in 9.1). The real problem is the mixing together of all the "legacy" X11 fonts for old school X Windows apps with new TrueType fonts used in modern XRender/Xft apps. This creates a font management nightmare. What's worse is none of the font management programs make all this stuff crystal clear and usable, even for an experienced user.

So yes, font management is still a big thorn in the side of the X Window System, though it's much better now than it used to be, with Xft/XRender. I don't really see why we would do anything other than A) incrementally improve those and B) make the old rendering system OPTIONAL and try to get everything in modern Linux distros ported over to used the new X rendering infrastructure.

Rather than writing new font management subsystems for X, perhaps we should look for the longer term to alternatives to X, architectures that are cleaner for a desktop environment, where we can provide source-level compatibility for Qt and Gtk apps, and make the old X protocol a strap-on (like running an X server on a Windows box, or on Mac OS X), so that people who need to run legacy X apps can still do so, but that those who want a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use desktop environment can get it.
Re:Still inferior by cxvx · 2003-03-28 07:22 · Score: 5, Informative

Simply put I hate Sun and all their software products because they have REPEATABLY shown themselves to be the microsoft of unix-land.

You mean that microsoft has given things like NFS, Pam, Openoffice.org, Netbeans, ... to the community?
If only that were true, then we could use more "microsofts of the unix world" :)

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Re:Still inferior by be-fan · 2003-03-28 07:33 · Score: 4, Informative

This is total bullshit. The guy knows nothing about Xft, Stsf, or FreeType.

1) FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer. On a high-res LCD, any version of FreeType with the improved autohinters is also extremely good. I personally prefer it to ClearType's rendering, for two reasons: it doesn't require sub-pixel AA (which still causes visible color fringing in Cleartype) to look sharp, and letter shapes look more natural (less hinted, but still sharp). If you don't believe me, look at screenshots of my desktop: this and this.

2) Rendering quality has nothing to do with Xft vs Stsf. Neither of these font services do the actual rendering; that is still handled by FreeType. These services are for font finding and font matching.

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Re:Still inferior by Fnkmaster · 2003-03-28 08:15 · Score: 3, Informative

I really recommend doing a full upgrade to 9.1 then. It uses the latest FreeType, comes with a pre-rolled Xft-enabled Mozilla 1.3, XFree86 4.3, and you can get all the addons (hacked FreeType with "patent-be-damned" features enabled, MSFonts RPM, etc.) from Texstar's RPM archive (which you can add easily to your urpmi media list for dumb-easy updating).

All the "clipped font rendering" issues (like your clipped S and so forth) that I had with my older Mandrake 9 installation are finally gone with my current 9.1 install, and I finally feel comfortable enough looking at the fonts that I can imagine using this desktop a significant part of my day. And some of the KDE 3.1.1 styles (like liquid) have some truly slick eye candy to them. The big problem remaining here is X's window redraw speed when you move windows around and the like. Some have claimed that the 2.5.x Linux kernels fix this with some changes to timing or interrupt parameters to make a more "desktop-friendly" kernel (like that magic constant you used to be able to tweak in the kernel to get a much more responsive desktop). Of course, the distros should have been doing this all along to make a real out-of-the-box desktop GUI experience that works and feels qualitatively fast on all modern hardware. Until they get that working, Linux just ain't going to be ready for the desktop.
Re:Still inferior by spitzak · 2003-03-28 09:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

I have written toolkits that are portable to Windows and I must point out that your claims that "policy" is why Windows look nicer are wrong. I can make a program that completely ignores every GUI guideline and "consistency" requirement in the world, and it will still look nicer on Windows, because I can do a call that take a single string name of a font to GDI32, and then I can draw any string, and I am absolutely 100% guaranteed that the user will see nicely-rendered letters. Nice fonts have absolutely ZERO to do with that "consistent user interface" and "policy" and everything to do with the developers scrapping some back compatability and writing actualy hard code to do the job.

Unfortunately the fact that X sucks is being used to force very bad ideas (such as toolkits in the server) that would condemn Linux to being totally unable to compete with any platform that allows innovation in the user interface.

What X needs is easy to program for and advanced rendering capabilities. I can draw a damn button, what I can't draw right now is UTF-8 text. Programmers using "consistency" as an excuse to force people to use their own implementation of a button, rather than getting to work on hard stuff like rendering, are causing more damage to Linux (and Windows, too!) than anything.
Re:Still inferior by Anonymous Coward · 2003-03-28 10:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer.

Except no Linux distro can legally ship a product with TrueType hinting enabled. Apple has patents on TrueType hinting. So Linux fonts look worse than Windows fonts because of Apple. Ironic?
Re:Still inferior by Fnkmaster · 2003-03-28 12:43 · Score: 4, Informative

Well, I respectfully disagree. I think you and I basically see eye to eye on the idea of being able to make higher-level GUI API calls, and _presumably_, also having a higher-level protocol for communications between the "client" and "server" (or application and windowing system to get away from X terminology). We are in 100% agreement that a programmer should ALWAYS make an API call that says "render string 'foo' at location bar", rather than say "retrieve font bitmap foo, now do some internal font rendering in client, transmit back bitmap baz to server..." or whatever the hell goes in with the old school X infrastructure.

XRender seemed to greatly improve font output quality in X. And I understand it, XRender and the Xft extensions basically do exactly what we both agree should have been done. In other words, it's already there. For example, Xft has the API call:

void XftDrawStringUtf8 (XftDraw *d, XftColor *color, XftFont *font, int x, int y, XftChar8 *string, int len);

Clearly this DOES let you draw a UTF-8 string on a button pretty damned easily. Now where we disagree is whether this is "good enough". I judge this based on opening up my KDE desktop and looking at the apps that I want to use. Evolution (which is better than Kmail), Phoenix, OpenOffice - shit, these are all Gtk applications. Oh wait, you mean Gtk apps don't look right with my KDE desktop? Separate themes, different theming functions (which I can't for the life of me figure out how to access without having Gnome on my machine). This is a nightmare.

Face it. Windows at least strongly suggests policy for everything. You can always go and roll your own in Windows too. But all the normal desktop apps have consistent colors, toolbar structure, use the same fonts, render them through the same system, and so on. If everybody used Gtk or if everybody used Qt, I suppose there wouldn't be a problem, but they don't. I don't like people "innovating" with new GUI toolkits. If you need to create a custom widget for a specific app, fine, but I want one set of menus, one set of text drawing functions, etc.

Perhaps it could be solved by a common theming system and some basic shared libraries that are developed cooperatively between Qt and Gtk so that they can still "innovate" separately all they want, but keep some of these basic functions consistent to guarantee a common look and feel without having to play ridiculous games looking for themes like BlueCurve specifically designed to look alike on both systems.
Re:Still inferior by walt-sjc · 2003-03-28 13:00 · Score: 4, Informative

Yeah, and he sure as hell did not read any of the docs at stsf sourceforge. There is a good side-by-side comparison of xft2 and stsf.

It's quite interesting, and stsf looks like it may have certain advantages over xft2. xft2 for example does not do layout - that's an application thing (gnome uses pango according to the doc) and stsf DOES do layout. According to sun, stsf has a 30-200% performance improvement over xft2.

stsf does NOT solve all the problems with X fonts however. They are still a god awful mess in regards to configuration.

Mightn't this be a good thing? by Alderete · 2003-03-28 07:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

One of the things that's always struck me about X is that the type rendering is poor, compared to the state-of-the-art rendering on contemporary commercial OSes. This has been true, in my personal comparisons, over many years. (I.e., as X advances, so does the state-of-the-art, making relative progress nil.)

I remember when I worked at Be, we licensed a renderer from Bitstream, specifically because writing a really good type renderer is exceptionally hard.

Perhaps this is an area where Open Source nees a leg up from a well-funded commercial outfit, like Sun. Can anyone comment on the actual quality of this new library, relative to existing solutions?

Re:Mightn't this be a good thing? by JanneM · 2003-03-28 07:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

A leg up isn't sufficient. Problem is, a lot of technologies in the font rendering area are patented. For instance, there is no _really_ good hinting engine enabled for truetype fonts, simply because it's patent ecumbered and would require licence fees for every desktop using it. That is not to say a hinting engine isn't available, just that it's not compiled in...

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Re:Mightn't this be a good thing? by be-fan · 2003-03-28 07:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?

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A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Hello, logic? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-03-28 07:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

- If Sun's project is vastly inferior, no one will use it and it won't cause "fragmentation".

- If Sun's project is vastly *superior*, then the people who switch to it will enjoy a great implementation. You shouldn't force Sun to collaborate in this case. Mozart's compositions wouldn't be as good if he had been forced to "collaborate" with the inferior composers of his time.

- It's only if Sun's project is "comparable" to previous projects that it will cause fragmentation.

Re:restarting X by Jeffrey+Baker · 2003-03-28 07:11 · Score: 4, Informative

Ignorance strikes again. It is not necessary, just add a font to the fontconfig directory (~/.fonts, for a user), and the font will be available via fontconfig/xft2. For core fonts you need xset fp rehash. In no case do you need to restart the XFree86 server.

Name change? by Quixote · 2003-03-28 07:12 · Score: 3, Funny

to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf,

Maybe they should rename it to stfu...

Baa--dum! Thank you.. I'll be here all weekend.

Since it currently sucks... by Art+Popp · 2003-03-28 07:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

...I would welcome some kind of change.

As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.

Havoc makes a good point:
You also still have to show the server-side stuff working with good performance and real-life significant memory savings.

But one can't put something to that test unless one develops it.

It basically comes down to: If a corporation is going to invest money in an open source development they are going to have some influence on how it's spent (in this case in terms of man hours). This influence may not be considered optimal to the other people in the movement, but it is Sun's money to spend.

And since I'm running RH 8.0, and OpenOffice, GIMP and AbiWord all have completely different font selections, I can't really see how it's going to get more fragmented.

Thank you for your efforts Sun Microsystems, I'm anxious to see the reuslts.

Re:Since it currently sucks... by dominator · 2003-03-28 08:48 · Score: 3, Informative

Actually, Gimp and AbiWord use FontConfig/Xft2 either directly or indirectly (read: transparently) now, as can any GTK2 application. I suggest you go get gimp 1.3.12 and AbiWord 1.1.4. Ximian's OpenOffice will use Xft2/Fontconfig as well. Expect that to be released _soon_

Having worked on these projects, I know all too well how bad it was. The font situation *was* deeply fragmented. Fontconfig made it all better. Let's not make it suck again. IMO, Sun would do better to simply support the Render extension on their XServers, or to improve the X backend to Xft2. It *can* be done. I'm dreading Sun's results. I'm afraid they've just made a lot more work for all of the users and hackers out there.

Dom

Question... by Trashman · 2003-03-28 07:32 · Score: 4, Interesting

How open is Opentype?

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Stsf: because Xft2 doesn't use enough buzzwords by iabervon · 2003-03-28 07:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

From Sun's side-by-side comparison, it seems like Xft2 is a carefully designed project taking into account the needs of application designers to reach a clearly defined goal, whereas Stsf is has vaguely-defined and excuses its unjustified design with a lot of buzzwords.

Xft2 is slightly inferior in that it doesn't have a way of communicating the data to the server pre-rasterization, so that the server can use hardware acceleration in the rendering process. Of course, there's no particular reason that, once XRENDER is complete, this couldn't be done.

Ok, fixed the fonts by duck_prime · 2003-03-28 07:58 · Score: 4, Funny

The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. [...] For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.

So we've got the fonts looking nice on Slashdot. Will somebody now please fix the content?

Sheesh.

One already exists of course..... by IamTheRealMike · 2003-03-28 08:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

One issue I think a lot of posters here are missing is that fontconfig and the rest are already deployed and working, whereas STSF isn't even completely implemented yet.

That means STSF doesn't have to be just a little bit better, it has to be VASTLY better to justify ripping out a brand new font architecture. Nobody is convinced it is.

Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces, NOT implementations. Well, STSF can apparently emulate Xft, but you don't get any advantages that way, so what's the point?

So STSF had better be pretty amazing to justify it. Sure, Sun can go and use it if they like, but it'd require major b0rkage of GTK, and those patches would probably not make it back into the trunk, so they'd have basically forked GTK. Not good.

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The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

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