On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Freddie Witherden <fred...@witherden.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As some of you probably know I am working on the GSoC project to
> externalise the Mathtex engine from Matplotlib. Today I have been
> toying around with the renderer using various backends.
>
> One of the interesting things that I discovered was that the Cairo
> backend was making use of subpixel rendering. (Or 'ClearType' as
> Microsoft call it.) This is not surprising -- by default Cairo will
> respect a users fontconfig settings when rendering text. Since I have
> subpixel rendering enabled all text rendered by Cairo is subpixel
> rendered.
>
> While this is fantastic for on screen text -- being significantly more
> pleasing to look at that the text produced by the AGG backend -- it is
> unsuitable for print. Now it is not too difficult to disable this,
> Cairo has an API call: cairo_font_options_set_antialias to deal with
> this.
>
> While I could write a quick patch to always disable subpixel rendering
> it would be something off a loss to those who either view their graphs
> onscreen or export them for the web -- where using subpixel rendering
> is now surprisingly common.
>
> Is it worth looking into adding subpixel rendering as a configuration
> option?

The matplotlib.lines.Line2D objects has an antialiased property -- we
could add the same property to matplotlib.text.Text to turn on/off
subpixel rendering (which could also be supported as an rc param)

JDH

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