Re: Antialiased text on X11

[Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com>]

On Mar 31, 2005 11:42 AM, James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> wrote:
> So, if you are using sub-pixel rendering, the BCI and a well
> instructed font you will see *much* better text with a light
> background than with a dark.  But if you are using fonts w/o
> quality instructions — whether poorly-instructed fonts, non-
> ttf fonts, or freetype compiled w/o the interpreter — and/or
> greyscale rather than sub-pixel then light on dark should be
> almost as good as dark on light text.
> 
> Or at least that is what I saw back when I tested it.

Well, freetype has certainly improved _dramatically_ in recent times.

I use sub-pixel rendering on an LCD, and both hinted fonts (e.g.,
microsoft's stuff, the vera fonts) and non-hinted latin fonts look
quite spectacularly good -- almost every line you'd want to be 1-pixel
wide is almost exactly that, with no obvious fringing, fuzziness, or
non-uniformity, and there's no over-lightness or dropouts at all on a
black background.  While writing this message I tried comparing the
same text in the same font (using a few fonts), and the apparent
weight looks pretty much exactly the same on a black or a white
background.  [Whereas I've noticed that MS's font-rendering actually
does look fairly crappy on a black background.]

For many fonts, much of this goodness seems to be due to the
auto-hinter (which is unfortunately turned off by default).

Basically freetype seems to the point these days where it seems as
good or better than the (much crowed about) font rendering in windows
or OSX.  Certainly there are always details to make better, but ...
it's really, really, good.

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.