I am a fan of anti-aliased font. Thanks to Xft/FreeType to make this happening on X Window machines. I really love to see every character on my desktop be anti-aliased. Because anti-aliased text is about good looking, it can certainly be made looking better.
I am talking about one minor but anoying problem with anti-aliased text: for some fonts, the characters are showing much lighter at smaller size than at bigger size. Those fonts have thinner strokes. At smaller size, the stroke width is less than one pixel. The anti-aliased algorithm makes the stroke darkness depending on the coverage of the stroke on that pixel. For those thinner stroke fonts, the anti-aliased text can not reach its fullest darkness and appears so light that they are almost indistinguishable from the white background. Now anti-aliased text is not good to the eye anymore. There is an easy fix for this. After getting a glyph's pixel map from FT2, it can be enhanced by a simple table lookup. I did some experiment and the results are at: http://oto.sourceforge.net/alpha/index.html The lookup table could be generated by p' = 256 * (p/256) ^ alpha; (alpha >= 1) while alpha is a function of: a. Font. Thinner stroke font needs bigger alpha value; b. Point size. Smaller point size needs bigger alpha value. One place to implement this is in Xft. Before the glyph pixel map is blit to the surface, apply the alpha correction lookup table to the glyph pixel map. The alpha value can be specified as one optional font property. So something like times-12:alpha=1.2 can be used to request the font with proper alpha correction. _______________________________________________ Render mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/render
