Re: Rendering with xft and hinting
- From: Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>
- To: Dan Maas <dmaas dcine com>
- Cc: Soeren Sandmann <sandmann daimi au dk>, Dov Grobgeld <dov imagic weizmann ac il>, gtk-devel-list gnome org
- Cc: Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>
- Subject: Re: Rendering with xft and hinting
- Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 21:44:20 -0800
Around 23 o'clock on Mar 16, Dan Maas wrote:
> Believe it or not, my favorite fonts of all time are MS Sans Serif
> (the plain-jane default bitmapped font for Win32 GUIs) and the
> TrueType Courier that comes with Windows. Show me a font that renders
> better at small to moderate sizes, AA or not, and I'll switch
> immediately...
The Agfa Monotype font 'Andale Mono' is my current favorite for monospaced
text. On a digital LCD monitor with Xft generating per-component alpha
values, I find it usable at smaller sizes than any other fixed point font
I've ever used. I find Courier New to be too light and the slab serifs
too busy at smaller sizes on the screen.
For variable width text, I prefer Verdana -- the large x height and wide
spacing make text very clear, even at smaller sizes. The old MS Sans
Serif seems too bold and narrow to me; much like the old "chicago" font
from the macintosh.
I was once a strong opponent of anti-aliasing, but having been directed to
make it work (really, I was going to go off and do polygons and image
scaling if Dirk Hohndel hadn't insisted on AA text), I decided to give it a
try. After a week with really high quality fonts and the TrueType byte code
interpreter displaying text in xterm, I spent a couple of days converting
my desktop applications and toolkits because I couldn't stand aliased text
anymore.
Feel free to compare Verdana in aliased vs anti-aliased:
http://keithp.com/~keithp/download/aliased.png
http://keithp.com/~keithp/download/antialiased.png
I use the tabs in Mozilla to flip between the two pages; that way the
text just toggles between the two rendering modes.
Having used these fonts for over a year, I can't imagine going back. To
use any Gtk+ 1.2 app (or Gtk+ 2.0 app using GdkFont objects) is painful
enough that I generally spend the 15 or 20 minutes needed to convert an
app that I'm going to use to read a lot of text.
Hence my suggestion that Gtk+ 2.0 provide a parallel Xft version of the
GdkFont APIs to ease this conversion process. I understand the reluctance
to incorporate any new functionality into that horribly broken and
non-Unicode API, but, for my own uses, it's nicer to take an existing
8859-1 centric app and make it use Xft with a few brief edits than to
recode it all using Pango...
Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab
[
Date Prev][
Date Next] [
Thread Prev][
Thread Next]
[
Thread Index]
[
Date Index]
[
Author Index]