Re: [Nautilus-list] Xft Anti-aliasing, Libart antialiasing?

[Moses Lei <mlei mtmis com>]

> What do you mean libart? Both Xft and Nautilus uses freetype to rasterize
> the font glyphs. Given the same fonts the output should be identical.
>
> / Alex

I don't know much about the internals of Xft or Nautilus, but I was under
the impression that libart was the source of antialiasing for Nautilus.
However wrong I may be, however, there is still a visible difference
between the output of Nautilus and Xft.

> The Type1 rasterizer in FreeType doesn't do a very good job with hints
> yet; try getting some good TrueType fonts, and then make sure you've got a
> version of FreeType with the TT bytecode interpreter enabled.
>

I did already have a version of FreeType with the TT bytecode interpreter
enabled.

My attempt at matching font face and font sizes can be seen here:
http://mlei.mtmis.com/nautilus.jpg

The font was Arial, at size 11 according to gfontsel and at 14 according
to nautilus. My X dpi is 100x100. (There seems to be some disagreement
there as to relative font sizes...)

In the nautilus tree view, the GTK system font is used, with Xft
antialiasing. (this is with the gdkxft hack.) On the right is the Nautilus
main window with smooth graphics enabled. Look at the word "AGSatellite"
since it appears on both the left on the right.

This is, of course, subjective, but it is obvious to me that 1) the output
is not identical and 2) the output on the right is smoother and more
readable. Look especially at the curve of the capital G.

One might argue that the small difference in font size accounts for this
difference, but as far as I can tell, at all small font sizes (<=14 at
100x100 dpi) there is an appreciable difference of rendering quality
between Nautilus and Xft.

Opinions and flames welcome, as always.

Moses