[Rule-list] About font management

[Marco Fioretti]

Hello,

I just saw this on the Open Office list. It is a summary of a Slashdot
thread about antialiasing, which we may or may not need in RULE.

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti
		RULE project leader

----- Forwarded message from Martijn Dekkers <mdekkers at openoffice.org> -----

Subject: Re: [discuss] [Fwd: Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering]
From: Martijn Dekkers <mdekkers at openoffice.org>
Date: Wed,  6 Mar 2002 21:26:25 +0100
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Thanks, this is good stuff.

For those who don't feel like sifting through the stuff at /., here is the recap.
In essence, what this guy does is to disable the "hinting" in the font-rendering 
system. This gives a much better level of AA quality. This is partly because the 
freetype library, that handles this stuff has been forced to disable certaing 
routines related to this "hinting" due to a patent issue.

However, either if you have a license, or if you live outside the US, you can 
re-enable the better hinting features of freetype. For example, I run SuSE, and 
do not live in the US. So I can follow the instructions on the SuSE support 
site that explain how to re-enable this.

On another note, I noticed that SO6 has some pretty good AA - similar to the 
level of quality that is shown in the screenshots this guy has on his site and 
better at least then OOo. I suspect (but am probably wrong) that Sun has some 
form of license to use these freetype routines, and OOo doesn't. OOo/SO uses 
seperate freetype libs as opposed to the ones that come with OS, right? (this 
is a question - I am not sure) so could this be a way to improve the AA out of 
the box for most end users? query the licensing status at setup time, and if 
the freetype stuff is not an issue, just copy the routines in question?

Cheers,

Martijn


Quoting Danese Cooper <danese.cooper at sun.com>:

* Article on /. about hack to improve anti-aliased fonts on Unix (running
* xFree86).
* 
* Might be helpful.
* 
* Danese
* 
* 
* -- 
Carpe Jugulum


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