Re: Anti-aliased font support library ready

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

It's pretty neat that you were able to implement this. The future of
text rendering in GTK+ is Pango (http://www.pango.org), and Pango is
designed to make it possible to plug in multiple font systems fairly
easily.

I don't think a anti-aliased system based on downscaling X fonts is
really the way we want to go, though. Grabbing data off the X server
is a bit slow, but the major concern I have is that the X font API's
are just not up to the demands of something like Pango. I've gone to
some pretty extreme lengths in Pango to present a sort of reasonable
user interface to X fonts, but that really isn't the way forward.

The two possible ways I'd like to see anti-aliased fonts addressed in
GTK+ are:

 - Total client side rendering, probably based on FreeType2.  People
   (Lauris Kaplinski, Nathan Hurst and others) are doing work
   on using client-side rendering to do typography with Pango.

   Also, the (anti-aliased) font rendering in Elliot Lee's frame-buffer
   port of GTK+ is based on FreeType.

 - A new X font extension to fix the X problem. This would be depend
   on Keith Packard's new rendering model to deal with the 
   compositing issue for anti-aliasing.

Regards,
                                        Owen

Paul Sheer <psheer@obsidian.co.za> writes:

> Hi there
> 
> I have written anti-aliased font support, ala:
> http://grc.com/cleartype.htm. The implementation is simple,
> but efficient and fast and seems to produce excellent results.
> Cooledit-3.15.3 has it compiled in. See
> 	http://cooledit.sourceforge.net/screen_shots.php
> 
> The entire thing is implemented in three files in the
> cooledit distribution:
> 	aafont.c
> 	aafont.h
> 	conv.c
> 
> These are application independent --- it should be trivial to
> add this into Gtk.