Hello everyone, I've written a patch to libXft-2.1.7 that modifies the library to use the new built-in FreeType LCD color filtering features. It is currently available at:
http://david.freetype.org/lcd/libXft-2.1.7-lcd-filter-1.patch Note that: - IMPORTANT: the patched library will *not* compile if you haven't FreeType CVS, 2.2.2 or better previously installed !! since I didn't want to lose my time with configure.ac and all, this is detected by a #error statement at compile time, not configuration time. Any volunteer to move the check to the config script ? - the patched library doesn't care if FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING was defined in your FreeType build. If the feature is disabled, it will simply be tricked into displaying normal anti-aliased glyphs (even if the slower LCD-decimated glyph composition function will be used with XRender). it might be better, performance wise, to test if the feature is disabled initially, and if so, to only use the faster gray-level composition functions. However, I'll leave this to another patch. - the patch only uses FT_LCD_FILTER_DEFAULT at the moment. It shall be fairly trivial to update the code to use different filters based on user choices (the equivalent of "light" and "strong" hinting on MacOSX), but this needs updates to the fontconfig stuff used to store and process this kind of preferences beforehand, plus make it available to preferences dialog like gnome-font-properties As usual, please report any problem. The patch was tested in all modes (mono, gray, RGB, BGR, VRGB, VBGR) but I admit I didn't test all funky cases (e.g. transformed/rotated text) Installing this patch after 2.2.2 (a.k.a. current CVS at the moment), should affect all KDE applications, and some others that use libXft to render text (e.g. FireFox, Thunderbird). GTK/Gnome applications are likely not to be affected, since this will require a patch to Cairo, which I'll try to provide later. There will probably be several Cairo patches, because the font rendering internals have changed quite a bit between the various recent releases of the library (e.g. 1.0.4, 1.1.6, 1.2.0) Regards, and enjoy !! - David Turner - The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org) _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list Freetype@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
