Re: font anti-aliasing or smoothing

[john fremlin vii <vii altern org>]

On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 01:46:41PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> On 7 Dec 1999, John Fremlin wrote:
> > Wouldn't it be a good idea to have the GDK do font anti-aliasing or
> > just plain smudging?
> > 
> 
> The X architecture makes this a huge pain.

I have no more than a vague idea of the X API. Surely only two
functions are required from it however: 
	  1) Function to return pixmap at a given location in our window.
	  2) Function to draw pixmap back. 
I don't see how X could work without 2, and doesn't

XImage *XGetImage(display, d, x, y, width, height,
       plane_mask, format)

or the GDK wrapper for it, gdk_image_get provide 1?

(Sorry, what have I missed?)

> 
> You might be interested in the "X font deuglification HOWTO" which a
> search engine should turn up. It will tell you how to get your X server to
> provide antialiased fonts.

I tried a version at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU.html which
gives a 23 November 1999 timestamp. It does not refer to anti-aliasing
at all (?). The XFree86 manifesto for 4.0 makes some vague noises
about providing font smoothing, IIRC, and claims that font smoothing is
impossible under 3.3.

-- 

	john fremlin vii
	http://altern.org/vii