Turning off antialiasing

Turning off antialiasing

[Oliver Scholz]

I just upgraded to Emacs 23.1. Good work! I have not explored everything
yet, but I am already impressed. I like the little details, like that
isearch now displays which characters make the search fail. And with the
new internal coding system, I finally have combining diacritics. Yay!
(As soon as I find a font with the right glyphs I can finally write
so-called "umlauts" as they were intended, when I cite from German
baroque literature. I have been waiting for that for a long time!) Also,
Emacs' new appearance is nice and shiny. I find the new default font a
good choice, although I am not sure that I personally like it. But it
certainly gives Emacs a modern appearance.

Of course, upgrading broke a couple of things in my .emacs, as is to be
expected from a major upgrade. I'll fix it all, eventually. One thing,
though, is rather urgent for me:

Antialiasing, while looking pretty, lets the characters seem slightly
blurred, which, after a while, starts to hurt my eyes and gives me a
headache.

Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without changing the
font backend? If not, will there be one in the future? Ideally, I'd like
to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing is painful for me only
with the default face, since it's this face in which I read large chunks
of text on the screen.

Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right now to deal
with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs from using xft,
thereby turning off antialiasing entirely. Is that right? Or is there at
least a way to keep using xft and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which
I'd prefer?


    Oliver
-- 
15 Fructidor an 217 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Anselm Helbig]

At Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:18:23 +0200,
Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> I just upgraded to Emacs 23.1. Good work! I have not explored everything
> yet, but I am already impressed. I like the little details, like that
> isearch now displays which characters make the search fail. And with the
> new internal coding system, I finally have combining diacritics. Yay!
> (As soon as I find a font with the right glyphs I can finally write
> so-called "umlauts" as they were intended, when I cite from German
> baroque literature. I have been waiting for that for a long time!) Also,
> Emacs' new appearance is nice and shiny. I find the new default font a
> good choice, although I am not sure that I personally like it. But it
> certainly gives Emacs a modern appearance.
> 
> Of course, upgrading broke a couple of things in my .emacs, as is to be
> expected from a major upgrade. I'll fix it all, eventually. One thing,
> though, is rather urgent for me:
> 
> Antialiasing, while looking pretty, lets the characters seem slightly
> blurred, which, after a while, starts to hurt my eyes and gives me a
> headache.
> 
> Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without changing the
> font backend? If not, will there be one in the future? Ideally, I'd like
> to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing is painful for me only
> with the default face, since it's this face in which I read large chunks
> of text on the screen.
> 
> Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right now to deal
> with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs from using xft,
> thereby turning off antialiasing entirely. Is that right? Or is there at
> least a way to keep using xft and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which
> I'd prefer?

It's easy, just choose a bitmapped font. Something like

  Emacs.font: fixed

in your .Xresources should do it. Terminus is another popular choice
for a monospaced bitmapped font, and there are lots of others out
there. Using a bitmapped font also results in faster display
operations. 

That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
has a font tab where you can change these settings. You still might
prefer a non-antialiased bitmapped font, but that's a personal matter.

HTH, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Oliver Scholz]

Anselm Helbig <anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com> writes:

[...]
>> Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without changing the
>> font backend? If not, will there be one in the future? Ideally, I'd like
>> to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing is painful for me only
>> with the default face, since it's this face in which I read large chunks
>> of text on the screen.
>> 
>> Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right now to deal
>> with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs from using xft,
>> thereby turning off antialiasing entirely. Is that right? Or is there at
>> least a way to keep using xft and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which
>> I'd prefer?
>
> It's easy, just choose a bitmapped font. Something like
>
>   Emacs.font: fixed
>
> in your .Xresources should do it. Terminus is another popular choice
> for a monospaced bitmapped font, and there are lots of others out
> there. Using a bitmapped font also results in faster display
> operations. 

Thank you! Among the workarounds this is probably the best one. It is a
pity, though, I was rather looking forward to playing with various
scalable fonts. It seems that I'll be stuck with the same old bitmapped
fonts. On the plus side, faces for which it does not matter for me stay
antialiased that way.


> That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
> enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
> in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
> has a font tab where you can change these settings. 
[...]

It seems that my Ubuntu is way, way too old.



    Oliver
-- 
15 Fructidor an 217 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 01.09.2009 um 23:33 schrieb Oliver Scholz:

>> It's easy, just choose a bitmapped font. Something like
>>
>>   Emacs.font: fixed
>>
>> in your .Xresources should do it. Terminus is another popular choice
>> for a monospaced bitmapped font, and there are lots of others out
>> there. Using a bitmapped font also results in faster display
>> operations.
>
> Thank you! Among the workarounds this is probably the best one. It  
> is a
> pity, though

AFAIR urxvt offers to use font(set)s for character ranges and this  
specification offers an option to switch anti-aliasing or hinting on  
or off or use different font backends. The latter GNU Emacs 23.1  
offers too, the former it needs to inherit...

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

   Pete

Atheism is a non prophet organization.

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Anselm Helbig]

> > That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
> > enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
> > in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
> > has a font tab where you can change these settings. 
> [...]
> 
> It seems that my Ubuntu is way, way too old.

Really? And my colleagues poke fun at be because I'm still using
Hardy. 8-)


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Oliver Scholz]

Anselm Helbig <anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com> writes:

>> > That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
>> > enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
>> > in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
>> > has a font tab where you can change these settings. 
>> [...]
>> 
>> It seems that my Ubuntu is way, way too old.
>
> Really? And my colleagues poke fun at be because I'm still using
> Hardy. 8-)

Tell them you know someone who still uses Edgy Eft.

No kidding. I know I should upgrade -- if only to avoid being mocked --,
but it'd take half a day until everything is configured again the way it
should, and I dread that boring half day. Somehow, the times when things
like that were still fun are long past.


    Oliver
-- 
16 Fructidor an 217 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[David Kastrup]

Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

> Anselm Helbig <anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com> writes:
>
>>> > That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
>>> > enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
>>> > in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
>>> > has a font tab where you can change these settings. 
>>> [...]
>>> 
>>> It seems that my Ubuntu is way, way too old.
>>
>> Really? And my colleagues poke fun at be because I'm still using
>> Hardy. 8-)
>
> Tell them you know someone who still uses Edgy Eft.
>
> No kidding. I know I should upgrade -- if only to avoid being mocked
> --, but it'd take half a day until everything is configured again the
> way it should, and I dread that boring half day.

No, that's when you upgrade to the next version.  When upgrading more
than that, stuff goes downhill.


-- 
David Kastrup

RE: Turning off antialiasing

[Drew Adams]

> I just upgraded to Emacs 23.1. Good work! I have not explored 
> everything yet, but I am already impressed. I like the little
> details, like that isearch now displays which characters make
> the search fail.

Glad you like that. It's a very minor feature, but it does help. I first added
it to completion (in Icicles), then to Isearch (in isearch+.el, and later in
vanilla Emacs). 

If you like it in Isearch, you might like it even more for minibuffer
completion. There, you can use `C-M-l' to put point at the fail position. A
second `C-M-l' removes the suffix that failed to match. Because of the
possibility of delays for determining mismatch for remote files, there are a
couple of user options you can adjust, to get the behavior you want.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Icompletion#HighlightNonmatch

---

The big new feature for Emacs 23 is of course its Unicode support. As far as I'm
concerned, the Unicode support _is_ Emacs 23. Thanks to Kenichi Handa for that,
and also for enhanced font support. A tremendous amount of work, no doubt. Seems
like it touched everything in Emacs, one way or another.

> Antialiasing, while looking pretty, lets the characters seem slightly
> blurred, which, after a while, starts to hurt my eyes and gives me a
> headache.
> 
> Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without 
> changing the font backend?

Someone will answer you, I'm sure. I don't know the answer.

I'm guessing that the effect of antialiasing depends on one's platform to some
extent. On MS Windows, I wouldn't work without it. (There are some freebie tools
that allow for fine-tuning on Windows, BTW.)  

To be honest, I just skipped Emacs 21 altogether, primarily because of its lack
of antialiasing. For some reason, the Emacs 20 build on Windows is a great
build, and it antialiases. Emacs 21 was a (long) regression in that respect, on
Windows at least.

In Emacs 23, other platforms also have antialiasing now. Yes, it can take some
getting used to. The jaggies are crisp, but they don't resemble real characters
much. ;-)

> Ideally, I'd like to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing
> is painful for me only with the default face, since it's this face
> in which I read large chunks of text on the screen.

Why not change the default face to one you like? Here are some suggestions:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GoodFonts

FWIW, I use "-*-Lucida Console-normal-r-*-*-14-112-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1" (on
Windows). (The screenshot on that page is fuzzy; the text on my screen is not
fuzzy.)

> Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right 
> now to deal with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs
> from using xft, thereby turning off antialiasing entirely.
> Is that right? Or is there at least a way to keep using xft
> and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which I'd prefer?

Good question. Did you check the manual? If you do get an anser, and you don't
find anything about adjusting antialiasing in the manual, then please file a doc
bug, to help others with the same questions.

A quick search for "antialias" shows that there is an `antialias' font property
for MS Windows (Emacs manual, node Windows Fonts). And the index suggests that
that is the only help for antialiasing (index entry `font antialiasing (MS
Windows)'.

Re: Turning off antialiasing

[Oliver Scholz]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

[...]
> I'm guessing that the effect of antialiasing depends on one's platform to some
> extent. On MS Windows, I wouldn't work without it. (There are some freebie tools
> that allow for fine-tuning on Windows, BTW.)  

I suspect that it depends much more on how much and what you read
on-screen, and, more importantly how sensitive one is to that blurred
effect. Just like some people get RSI and others don't.

[...]
> A quick search for "antialias" shows that there is an `antialias' font property
> for MS Windows (Emacs manual, node Windows Fonts). And the index suggests that
> that is the only help for antialiasing (index entry `font antialiasing (MS
> Windows)'.

I found that, too. There is no such face property on GNU Linux, at least
not in Customize. I have not yet checked whether the necessary mechanics
on the C side are in place. I'll file a bug report eventually, depending
on whether I find the time (and desire) to look into it myself or not.


    Oliver
-- 
16 Fructidor an 217 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!