Uglyness of the fonts has nothing to do with how they are rendered...
You have two/three items left to get good rendering:
1) installing high quality fonts. The TrueType Web fonts that Microsoft
distributes qualify there... You'll need to configure your font
stuff to use them, and make sure OpenOffice is using the TrueType fonts.
2) by default, Freetype (which does the font rendering) is often built
without using the hint information in the font, due to a patent Apple
holds (in the U.S.). I get different reads on how valid that patent is.
You need to ensure that the Freetype being used is built to use the hints.
I don't know if OpenOffice uses Freetype or not, or if it does, if Freetype
is built with hinting turned on.
3) to get the last mile, you need to configure Xft to use subpixel decimation
(for best results on flat panels; this isn't visible on monitors).
When I've run Open Office, (recent build), it looked like it may have
been using a private copy of Freetype, Xft, or doing its own text rendering
(not using the system version of Freetype, and I can't get it to perform
subpixel decimation. I haven't had time to investigate further. So the
quality I get (on Linux anyway), is good, but not as good as things that
do "the whole banana".
- Jim
> Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: marty scholes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 06:51:14 -0700
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Re: [Render] Re: XFt on Solaris
> -----
> Jim,
>
> Many thanks for the direction here. I found a "solaris" build of the library
> on xfree86.org, but it was an x86 build, not sparc. I did get the sources to
> xfree86 4.1 and did a make world. I then installed the library on
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH, only to discover that I had libXrender.so.1.1, while
> openoffice wanted libXrender.so.1.
>
> I soft linked libXrender.so.1 to libXrender.so.1.1 to see what would happen.
> Openoffice quit complaining but the text was still ugly and marginally
> readable.
>
> I wonder if I have a version problem or am missing other libraries, or maybe
> openoffice shouldn't be placed into a production environment just yet. I
> think I'll back off of this until things mature some. A pity though, my
> users were looking forward to better M$ filters.
>
> Thanx again,
>
--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
Compaq Computer Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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