Re: OT -- Abiword doesn't show anti-aliased TrueType fonts eventhough I am running XFree86 4.0 with TrueType fonts installed and enabled.

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris kaplinski com>]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Miles Lane wrote:

> I know this is off-topic, but I guess there is some slight relevance,
> since it constrains the quality of font display in Gnome applications.
> 
> I thought that once TrueType fonts were supported by X Windows, 
> I would get highly-legible font rendering at arbitrary point sizes
> due to the the use of anti-aliasing.  My experience seems to indicate
> that although I can now display TrueType fonts in the X applications
> that allow me to select my TrueType fonts, anti-aliasingis not 
> happening.

X Free supports TrueType font format, but there AFAIK is no support yet
for antialiasing font on-screen. Although that particular problem is quite
easy to address (I hope), there are more flaws with font system than that,
and if X font extension will be done, it would be nice to address more
issues at once (rotated fonts, nontrivial metrics, on-demand glyph
rasterization, etc.)

> Do any of you know:
> 
> 	1)  Is there something I need to tweak to get anti-aliasing 
> 	    to work in XFree86 4.0?
> 
> 	2)  If anti-aliasing still isn't supported in XFree86, 
> 	    when will it become supported?
> 
> 	3)  If there is no plan to implement anti-aliasing support
> 	    in XFree86, is there a plan to support anti-aliased
> 	    fonts within the Gnome environment?

I am currently working on GnomeFont library (which can one day give base
for more general GFont framework), which will handle following cases:
- Rendering true antialiased fonts
- Rendering hihg-legibility (grid-fitted) antialiased fonts
- Rendering bitmap fonts
It is currently based on FreeType1, but will support Type1 fonts too,
either via separate type1 library or FreeType2.
Although we cannot force X to display antialiasing now, GnomeFont will
support antialiased rendering to GnomeCanvas, so most Gnome
graphics/text/layout programs should improve by that. It will also output
either printer fonts or rendered bitmaps for gnome-print, so I hope the
ultimate quality goal will be reached.

> On a related topic, how is the support of WYSIWYG coming for 
> Gnome printing?  From what I read about gnome-print, it sounds
> like a lot of effort is going into having a great Gnome printing
> engine and UI, but until there is a single engine driving anti-
> aliased fonts to both the display and the printer, we won't have
> WYSIWYG.  Also, it seems to me that in order to have a really good
> user experience, the display engine for anti-aliased fonts ought to
> be in XFree86, not in Gnome.  Otherwise, when the shortcoming is 
> addressed in XFree86, we'd have two basically redundant and possibly
> incompatible display rendering engines.

The "standard" display engine for Gnome is canvas - the structured 
graphics engine. Even, if X will eventually support alpha, antialiasing,
etc. the canvas framework probably does not change much, and bare X, being
event-based display engine is not sufficent for high-level graphics.
Still, having gnome fonts to support plain X would be good, and I hope
eventually it will do that too.

Regards,
Lauris Kaplinski