I've installed a recent (2/15/03) CVS version of XFree86 on my x86 Linux 2.4.20 system with Freetype 2.1.4rc1. My video hardware is a Dell 1800FP LCD display with an ATI Radeon 7500 QW card. I'm experimenting with Xft-based fonts, but I've run into some trouble and hence am looking for suggestions.
I don't particularly like the antialiased fonts that I get from Xft at small sizes (12 points or less) -- they look a blurry to me, and the color aberration that comes from enabling LCD subpixel rendering gives me a headache. Hence, I've been trying to teach Xft to render small text without antialiasing, while still beautifying larger text (a la MS Windows). I can get fontconfig to do this for me, but the resulting non-antialiased fonts are rendered noticeably worse by Xft than by the core X rendering engine with the "freetype" module. For an example with Mozilla rendering MS Verdana at 12 points, please see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/mozilla-xft.png http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/mozilla-noxft.png The first screenshot is of Mozilla built with Xft rendering enabled, while the second is the same text using X's usual rendering mechanism with the Freetype backend. The Xft text is noticeably blockier and more uneven than the non-Xft text. Both Xft and the core renderer call the same Freetype library, so I assume they've configured the library differently. Can anyone suggest either (1) an appropriate fontconfig incantation or (2) a patch to the flags Xft uses to call the Freetype glyph renderer that would make non-AA text rendered with Xft look as nice as the same text rendered without Xft? I did try to implement the modifications suggested in the Freetype 2.1.3 release notes with no visible effect, but I'm not sure I did it correctly. Thanks in advance, Jeremy PS - I've had the same problem using earlier versions of Freetype (both 2.1.3 and the slightly older version shipped with XFree86). PPS - if it matters, I'm using Freetype's autohinter rather than the patent-encumbered TTF hinting engine. _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
