Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Ami Fischman]

Hi there,

Is anyone working on adding Xft/freetype/anti-alias support to emacs?
Equivalently, is there any work being done on a gtk/qt-specific port of the
windowing code?  ("equivalent" because both toolkits support Xft natively
in their most recent incarnations (2.0 and 3.0, resp).

In case the answer to both previous questions is negative, is there a
roadmap description of the emacs source tree or do new developers just jump
in head first?

Cheers,
-- 
  Ami Fischman
  usenet@fischman.org

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, 2002-10-02 at 18:27, Ami Fischman wrote:

> Is anyone working on adding Xft/freetype/anti-alias support to emacs?

I worked on this for a bit a few months ago.  However, it became very
complicated, and I mostly abandoned the project.  If you're interested
in picking up where I left off, I've put up the files I modified here:
http://web.verbum.org/~walters/files/emacs-xrender

> Equivalently, is there any work being done on a gtk/qt-specific port of the
> windowing code?  ("equivalent" because both toolkits support Xft natively
> in their most recent incarnations (2.0 and 3.0, resp).

A GTK+/GNOME 2 port would be significant effort.  One big issue would be
dealing with the fact that GTK+ 2's "TextView" widget also implements a
fair portion of Emacs' display capabilities.  For example, it has the
equivalent of text properties.  It also supports more than Emacs does;
specifically full Unicode and bidirectional text.

So maybe the way to do it would be to just ignore GtkTextView, and just
use the scrollbar, menu, and dialog stuff.  I think that's what XEmacs
does.  Even then you're talking about a whole lot of work.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    A GTK+/GNOME 2 port would be significant effort.  One big issue would be
    dealing with the fact that GTK+ 2's "TextView" widget also implements a
    fair portion of Emacs' display capabilities.

There is no particular reason to use that widget.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    Is anyone working on adding Xft/freetype/anti-alias support to emacs?
    Equivalently, is there any work being done on a gtk/qt-specific port of the
    windowing code?

We are looking for someone to make Emacs work with GTK.
Someone said a few months ago that he was interested, but later
he said he did not have much time.  If you want to work on it
more actively, that would be very good.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Jan D.]

> Hi there,
> 
> Is anyone working on adding Xft/freetype/anti-alias support to emacs?
> Equivalently, is there any work being done on a gtk/qt-specific port of the
> windowing code?  ("equivalent" because both toolkits support Xft natively
> in their most recent incarnations (2.0 and 3.0, resp).

I'm working on a Gtk port (not much time to spend on this lately, but
moving forward somewhat faster this month).  But that won't give you
anti-alias support "for free".  In Gtk at least, it would mean a total
conversion of all display code in Emacs to use Gtk primitives
for text.  This duplication of code is undesirable.

Putting in anti-alias code that works with X regardless of toolkit would
be nice.

> In case the answer to both previous questions is negative, is there a
> roadmap description of the emacs source tree or do new developers just jump
> in head first?

Head first I guess :-)

	Jan D.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Ami Fischman]

"Jan D." <jan.h.d@swipnet.se> writes:

[...]

> I'm working on a Gtk port (not much time to spend on this lately, but
> moving forward somewhat faster this month).  But that won't give you
> anti-alias support "for free".  In Gtk at least, it would mean a total
> conversion of all display code in Emacs to use Gtk primitives
> for text.  This duplication of code is undesirable.

My impression was that if the code uses pango, then you can relatively
simply select between having pango use Xft/ft2/std.X calls.  Is this
incorrect or were you not including using pango under the heading of a "Gtk
port"?

> Putting in anti-alias code that works with X regardless of toolkit would
> be nice.

I think having emacs use Xft2 directly instead of standard X font interface
would do it.  

Cheers,
-- 
  Ami Fischman
  usenet@fischman.org

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Jan D.]

torsdagen den 3 oktober 2002 kl 21.28 skrev Ami Fischman:

> "Jan D." <jan.h.d@swipnet.se> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> I'm working on a Gtk port (not much time to spend on this lately, but
>> moving forward somewhat faster this month).  But that won't give you
>> anti-alias support "for free".  In Gtk at least, it would mean a total
>> conversion of all display code in Emacs to use Gtk primitives
>> for text.  This duplication of code is undesirable.
>
> My impression was that if the code uses pango, then you can relatively
> simply select between having pango use Xft/ft2/std.X calls.  Is this
> incorrect or were you not including using pango under the heading of a "Gtk
> port"?

Yes, pango can use X calls, but Emacs have to convert to using pango, and 
that is a lot of code.  Basically you would have one pango version and one 
X version of the code, or just one pango version.  I don't know if the 
requirement to have pango to run Emacs is OK.  Also, Emacs would probably 
have to be converted to Unicode, since that is what pango uses.


>
>> Putting in anti-alias code that works with X regardless of toolkit would
>> be nice.
>
> I think having emacs use Xft2 directly instead of standard X font interface
> would do it.

If you say so, I haven't looked at Xft2.  I don't even like antialiased 
fonts, they make my eyes hurt :-)

	Jan D.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Werner LEMBERG]

> If you say so, I haven't looked at Xft2.  I don't even like
> antialiased fonts, they make my eyes hurt :-)

Please explain.  Recent FreeType versions (used in Xft2) support
various hinting modes.


    Werner

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Jan D.]

> 
> > If you say so, I haven't looked at Xft2.  I don't even like
> > antialiased fonts, they make my eyes hurt :-)
> 
> Please explain.  Recent FreeType versions (used in Xft2) support
> various hinting modes.
> 

It is not specific to Xft2, it is anti-aliased fonts in general.  For
example, I can not work with MaxOSX 10.2 more than an hour at a time.
I tried to change the settings for antialias, but it had no effect.
I am seriously considering reverting to 10.1.
I have the same problem with KDE anti aliasing, so I turn it off.

To me anti aliased fonts don't look smoother, they just look out of focus.
My stupid eyes tries to focus, but to no avail, since the "out of focus"
isn't really real.  I get a headache instead.

It isn't monitors either, I tried 5 different monitors.  CRT is a bit
better than TFT here.  So my interest in Xft and anti aliased text is
pretty low.

	Jan D.

Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Miles Bader]

On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 01:44:43AM +0200, Jan D. wrote:
> To me anti aliased fonts don't look smoother, they just look out of focus.
> My stupid eyes tries to focus, but to no avail, since the "out of focus"
> isn't really real.  I get a headache instead.

Isn't it generally held that only very large and very small type sizes should
be anti-aliased?  I find that in both these cases, it helps quite a bit,
though with large fonts I suppose it's more of an aesthetic improvement than
anything else.  I'd think that any decent system would allow you to set the
thresholds where antialiasing kicks in...

Part of the problem, of course, is when you simply don't have a good range of
hand-made bitmap fonts, and have to use scalable fonts -- and scalable fonts
at small sizes are often almost unreadable without anti-aliasing, and usually
pretty ugly even at `normal' sizes.  [also, complicated characters like those
in Chinese/Japanese are often unreadable even at `normal' sizes in scalable
fonts; maybe all the fonts I use have sucky hinting or something though]

-Miles
-- 
P.S.  All information contained in the above letter is false,
      for reasons of military security.