On Wednesday, July 24, 2002, at 10:12 PM, Michael Halcrow wrote:
> If you'll look closely at the screen capture for Web Browser on my Linux > page: > > http://opensource.byu.edu/linux_desktop.html > > You will see beautiful anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla. I am running > Gentoo 1.2. I set my USE variable as such in my /etc/make.conf: I looked closely, and I'm not seeing beautiful anti-aliased fonts. In the desktop_large.png screenshot, take a look at the link under the little "Sports" photo. In the text "Olympic Fame Fleeting", the l in "Fleeting" has been almost totally erased. The rest of the text looks somewhat less than smooth. There may be some anti-aliasing going on, but in my opinion it's still a bit short of beautiful. The BYU homepage shot is much better, since it's using a simpler sans-serif font, but the ending 'w' in overflow is blurred and the italic "Recent Devotionals" has a slight crook in the middle of the 'l'. As an exercise to see how nice fonts could look on the screen, try finding some document available in both PDF and HTML form. If you play with the zoom features of your PDF viewer and set your fonts in your web browser, you can make the displays roughly equivalent. The characters rendered in the PDF will look MUCH nicer than those in the web browser. That is how screen characters ought to look. On my Linux box at work, I use Galeon without anti-aliasing because I find the anti-aliasing both slows the machine down and in some cases makes the fonts look worse, such as the case of the disappearing l noted above. Anti-aliasing is not the solution for poor font rendering, which is the real culprit here. At home, I use Mac OS X. The Quartz rendering engine is based upon PDF, so it truly does have beautiful anti-aliased fonts. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the nice network transparency that X11 does. For my desktop, though, I'm happy with that tradeoff. And I can always run a rootless X server on top of it. Anyway, I think that overall the screenshots and the rest of the page are great. The fonts throughout the rest of the desktop are not anti-aliased, but they are well-rendered and very readable. And, at least in my opinion, that's the important part. --Levi ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the BYU UUG discussion mailing list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "UNSUBSCRIBE" as the message body Visit the BYU UUG website at: http://uug.clubs.byu.edu/
