> So you're saying the only anti-aliasing is overkill > anti-aliasing.
? What do you mean? > Who thought of this as a good idea? It is ever so slightly more > accurate but really not worth it on lower end hardware such as > embedded systems. 4*4 oversampling is a high priority feature > request. I also suggest more oversampling rates of lower priority: > 6*5, 8*8, 2*2, 4*1, 6*1, 8*1, 2*1, oh you might as well make it > customizable, but at high priority is 4*4 oversampling. Sorry, but you are talking nonsense. FreeType was developed especially to run on embedded systems! In particular, the rasterizers (both the B/W and the A/A one) do work with systems that have just a very small amount of memory. > > FreeType doesn't do any filtering for grayscale rendering. > > Instead, it produces *exact* coverage values per pixel with 256 > > levels. In general this gives better results than filtering, for > > example, if you have to render long lines with a small slope. > > That is pretty much what a box filter is (to take the area in each > square). Well, yes. IIRC, however, rendering B/W at a much larger resolution followed by applying a filter is *slower* than FreeType's approach of directly computing the pixel coverage. > But to implement that exactly would be severe overkill. [...] Again, you are talking nonsense. Please get acquainted with FreeType's A/A rendering code before doing such unfounded claims. > If the glyph is very complex, with many intersections with pixel > edges and corners, the method would spend a lot of time finding the > exact value of the intersections then taking the exact integral > value of the entire square and take 8 fractional bits of it. This > is a processing waste, it also makes it much more complicated to > implement dropout control (in anti-aliasing it's supposed to have a > more subtle effect functioning on individual samples) There is no drop-out control in A/A mode, since it's kind-of useless. > and you would have to completely rewire the method to disable > vertical anti-aliasing as in the gasp flag. FreeType doesn't support the (crippled) mode of having A/A only along one axis. > It makes FreeType impossible to run with anti-aliasing on embedded > platforms. I am marking adding 4*4 oversampling as a high priority > now because FreeType deserves to have anti-aliasing (obviously with > correct gamma, and only when the font enables anti-aliasing) even on > embedded platforms that could run 4*4 oversampling but certainly not > the integral overkill monstrosity. Sigh. Werner