FWD: Magnification option: don't use anti-aliased fonts

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Greetings,

Forwarded from the fontconfig alias, a note from Martin Lucina describing
how to turn anti-aliasing off for the fontconfig system.  Some users with
visual impairments may find this to be an improvement, especially when using
Gnopernicus screen magnification (try it with biliner smoothing).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: [Fontconfig] FAQ update, accessibility comments
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:57:31 +0200
From: Martin Lucina <mato kotelna sk>
Reply-To: Fontconfig development list <fontconfig fontconfig org>
To: fontconfig fontconfig org

Hi all,

I have updated the Fontconfig FAQ at

http://wiki.fontconfig.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Fontconfig/FontconfigFAQ

with a discussion of how to disable antialiased font rendering on a
Fontconfig-enabled system. Having searched the web for some time and not
found the "right" answer to this question, I went and figured it out
myself. Please take a look and tell me if I've said anything bogus.

You may ask why I have done this -- for me it's an accessibility issue.
Antialiased fonts look blurry on my LCD, even with the latest
XFree86/Freetype/GTK+2/Fontconfig. I've also tried various combinations
of subpixel rendering settings but that seems to make it even worse, the
result as I can see it is that with subpixel rendering I see funky bits
of red and/or blue along with the text.

Could this be due to the fact that I am diagnosed with astigmatism
(essentially means I use only a single eye at any one time)? Maybe
someone can tell me what subpixel rendering looks like for them if they
look at it with one eye closed? :-)

There may be more people affected by this (or those who just prefer the
non-antialiased rendering) and possibly it should be brought to the
attention of the GNOME/KDE accessibility people so that we can get this
mentioned in the FAQs and/or a preference for it in the random
Control-Center-of-the-week.

Apologies if this is not the right forum for this, but I gather that
quite a few desktop/distro people probably lurk here.

Please Cc: me on replies.

Thanks,

-mato

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