Hello David, hi, all!
On Monday 03 September 2001 13:25, David Turner wrote:
| Hello Vadim,
|
| > I think that it's still a question if we need something like Quartz on
| > Linux/UNIX.
| > MacOS X requires 128MB of RAM to run, and I can guess most of this RAM
| > is consumed by MacOS X's User Interface/Imaging Model.
| > I don't know exactly how much of RAM Quartz takes, but I can guess *a
| > lot*. Is it really necessary for general imaging/printing solution?
|
| The reason why MacOS X "consumes" so much memory is simply that it
| allocates a whole 32-bit pixmap for _each_ window it creates. Hence a
| 800x600 window takes about 2 Mb of memory, even if it's empty..
Hmm. From one side, caching is good.
>From other side, I am the person who like to open 20-30 Konqueror windows
simultaneously, working at 1024x768 at 24-bit :-))
Yes, I like web browsing, and very happy that I can open so many windows with
Linux. 2.5MB x 30 = 75MB. wow! And this is without any open docs...
IMO modern graphics cards/accelerators move now to "display list" approach,
very well known on *old* Vector (not *Raster*) displays.
for empty window, display list has just one operator: empty! :-))
So I doubt here Apple's decision. May be, they will change it in Mac OS XI ?..
|
| If you think about it, caching the full content of windows is the most
| simple (and probably performance-efficient) way to support the most
| important features of the OS X GUI (like full transparency +
| Genie effects)
|
| Normally, the pixmaps are allocated within the video card's memory, even
| though "ps" will never tell you that.. Good ole Unix users will tell you
well, even with 64MB of Video RAM, it can be easily exhausted.
I still doubt need to cache *every* Window contest.
Typical user has 8MB-16MB of Video RAM, and it's not enough to cache 30+
1024x768 32-bit pixmaps.
| X11 does about the same thing sometimes ;-) I'm pretty convinced that as
| soon as someone starts to use the Render extension to implement similar
| capabilities, it will certainly start eating as many bytes :-)
Yes, that's right. But on X11, you always can turn it off :-))
|
| Anyway, developers are mainly interested in the simple and
| device-independent API that Quartz provides to generate
| high-quality documents, not the bells-and-whistle things.
|
| I advise you to take a look at the documentation available on the
| Apple developers site. The Quartz 2D imaging model is very similar
| to Java2D, you can also think about it as Qt's "QPainter" on steroids
But can I use Quartx on Intel arhitecture? (either on Windows or
Linux/FreeBSD)?
It's rather expensive for me to buy new Mac just to see what the Quartz is.
I would rather wait for Diamond, to be sure I will get *brilliant* results
(and brilliant API), or wait when is bought by some Kind Guys and Quartz
open-sourced :))
| > If you start thinking about auto-converting to Type1, a lot of issues
| > come to mind (missing PostScript glyph names, hinting, subset/range
| > embedding), and there is no simple solution for those issues.
|
| No, but these have been implemented multiple times, in various different
| ways (e.g. Qt, Gnome-Print, StarOffice/OpenOffice to name just three of
| them). Wouldn't it be better if we had a single system-wide service to
| perform this instead ??
Yep, it would be nice to have a single system to handle all this.
I don't have StarOffice/OpenOffice here, so don't know how it handles this.
But I can tell you that AbiWord (AbiSource) can't handle this.
I was not able even to type in Russian/Cyrillic in it, and PS file generated
by AbiWord was terrible. It looks they use some kind of *synthetic* fonts,
and original outlines/hints are lost somewhere.
QT does handles it, but not pretty well. Lars Knoll wrote to me that process
will be improoved in QT3, but I don't know details.
ttf2pt1 (http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net) makes good conversion to Type1, but,
unfortunately, it is not used neither by Trolls or by AbiSource.
|
| At least, this would guarantee consistent results, and we would be able
| to improve the service without touching the applications and toolkits that
| use it..
|
| > Unfortunately, I don't know how it's handled in MacOS X/Quartz.
| > Does Quartz convert TT to Type1 or to Type3? If it converts to Type1,
| > what kind of *auto-hinting* algorithm Apple uses?
| > Does somebody have experience with this and can comment?
|
| From my experience, it seems that Quartz uses a small number of
| classic monochrome bitmap fonts, and _unhinted_ anti-aliased fonts.
| (Nautilus does this, by the way). they do sub-pixel positioning too..
|
_unhinted_ anti-aliased fonts can be good for some apps, but I doubt it's
usable for current (about 100dpi) display resolutions.
I would say if you have 300 dpi display with AA enabled, you probably should
skip hinting info. But that's not the case now, and would not be a case in
next 5-10 years :((
| And this doesn't seem to be problematic, since the fonts provided
| by the system are generally highly legible. Maybe they're using some
| advanced aa rasterizer / filter too, but I have been unable to spot
| hinting in most text displayed by MacOS X. Darn, I'd like to be
| proven wrong on this :-)
|
And you have, probably, seen only Latin texts.
>From my experience, problems begin when you start to use Cyrillic!..
I would like to see, how "�", "�", "�", and "�" rendered in MacOS.
Can you try, please?
|
| Also have a look at the new text engine in Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0,
| its anti-aliased hinter is much different than in previous versions,
| and I suspect they perform some sort of auto-hinting, instead of using
| the hints provided in the fonts..
|
Thanks for info, I missed Acrobat 5.0 announce...
|
| Regards,
|
| - David
--
Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
Do you have Arial font installed? Just test it!
http://kde2.newmail.ru/font_test_arial.html
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