Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-08-18 at 11:28, Michel Fodje wrote:
>
>>Is anti-aliased text supposed to work in Galeon/Mozilla? My experience
Yes.
>>with all the Betas so far is that it works occasionally. And when it
>>doesn't, I see strange effects like overlapping text. Usually,
>>reloading the page either brings back aa-text or fixes the overlap
>>without bringing back aa-text, or has no effect at all.
>>
>>Has anyone observed this?
>
>
> IIRC, the Mozilla packager changed the way it handles fonts when we
> switched to 1.1 beta. (Changelog for that release includes "Patch44 & 45
> (Giuseppe): enable freetype2 backend by default"). This definitely
> changed the font rendering here, however it doesn't really look quite
> right, especially on my laptop. It certainly doesn't display text as
which kind of TTF fonts are you using? IMHO with AA TTF enabled fonts
inside mozilla are rendered pretty better than unantialiased fonts (accessed
via xfs). Currently the feature is controlled by:
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", ...);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", ...);
in the unix.js file or the user config file.
Note that in this case mozilla directly access to the truetype fonts
(and not trough the xfs [which hasn't antialias]). The TTF fonts must be
in one of the following directories:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/drakfont/ttf
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/MathML/ttf
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
/usr/lib/office60/share/fonts/truetype
The antialias is achieved trough the libfreetype2 so it doesn't have the
subpixel antialias feature of Xft which slightly improve AA on LCD display
(and only LCDs). Of course if you don't have TTF fonts in one of this
directories, the xfs fonts are used. Note that TTF fonts are listed
uppercase in the mozilla can be selected in mozilla in the
Preferences/Appareance/Fonts menu.
An Xft patch for mozilla exists but is not stable and the
mozilla team doesn't seem planning to swallow it in the main tree.
Of course the best results can be achieved using:
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
and libfreetype2 with bytecode enabled (as the plf one). But our libfreetype2
has the bytecode hinter disabled (for patent reason), so we have to deal with:
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", true);
which gives accettable AA (someone could find a little blurred), but to
me it appear at least at the same level of the AA in the xpdf, xdvi/kdvi or
acroread and sligthly better than gv. Trying instead
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false)
as someone suggested gives worst results on many fonts (some of them appears
stretched horizontally) using our current libfreetype2 library (and not the plf
one).
> well as applications which use Xft (like GTK2 stuff - X-Chat for
> example). I'm not seeing problems like the above quoted, though - I just
> don't like the current rendering particularly, it's not as good as Xft.
> I believe it's possible to patch Moz to use Xft, but I also believe that
> at the moment doing that requires the use of CVS Xft :(. I have a
it would require Xft 2.0.
> feeling the badness of the rendering on the laptop is because it doesn't
> use subpixel hinting; Xft can do this, and it makes anti-aliased fonts
> look far, FAR better on LCD screens, it's a pity that seemingly Moz
> doesn't use it :(. If i'm reading the changelog wrong and Moz actually
> is using Xft, well, it's not doing it very well :).
Bye.
Giuseppe.
