XFree86 Release Plans

sfid writes "Just read at XFree86 about the release plans for 4.0. The first beta will be availiable in July, further on there will be releases every 4-6 weeks. " Mentions several new chipsets in the 3.3.x tree, as well as several interesting new features for the 4.0 tree including video in a window, multihead, integrated TrueType, as well as 3D support Precision Insight's DRI stuff (which looked really excellent at LinuxExpo), Mesa, or SGIs GLX.

Comments

Crappy TTF rendering

[Matts]

And yet even with xfstt (or a patched XFree with ttf support) or xfsft (I've tried them all), font rendering at small point sizes is apalling. Absolutely terrible. No worse than PS font rendering at small sizes, but come on - Windows and MacOS have been doing good quality small point size rendering for years.

I seriously hope this improves (it's all down to a good hinting engine). That and font smoothing would seriously improve my X experience.

Matt.

perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

That's hinting, not anti-aliasing

[timur]

What makes TT fonts look good at small point sizes is "hinting", not anti-aliasing. AA makes medium to larger fonts look better by blurring the edges so that they appear smooth. Hinting is a set of instructions inside the font that tell the font rendering engine what modifications to make to the font at small point sizes. Microsoft's TT website has quite a bit of info on it - see http://www.microsoft.com/ty pography/hinting/hinting.htm.

Given the same TT font on both X and Windows, if X shows the small points worse than Windows does, then my guess would be that the hinting support in X is either missing, broken, or just not good enough.

--
Timur Tabi
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