“Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today. We are very proud to announce that Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Many people have worked long and hard to deliver Qt 4.8.0. Today that hard work reaches final release maturity, and we are celebrating! Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access, Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded as binary or source packages.”
Congratulations for the release.
Does this release has native support for Wayland already?
Edited 2011-12-16 22:06 UTC
I think that the answer is yes: the Qt Platform Abstraction has a plugin which “supports” Wayland.
Supports in quote because I’m not sure about its state.
Another improvement is that Qt will *finally* use X the proper way through XCB with QPA (official support planned to be in 5.0).
http://blogs.kde.org/node/4514
Qt 4.8 brings a solution of sorts in Calligra Words to the font rendering problem that plagued KOffice.
Qt 4.7 with Calligra Words:
http://www.abload.de/img/fonttest-2-3-84-more5g0cf.png
Qt 4.8
http://www.abload.de/img/fonttest-2-3-85-moreaz5zn.png
“We are disabling hinting because qt normally applies it too soon. And when it’s applied too soon it ruins the look rather than improve it.”
“The hinting caused quite horrible text as you can indeed clearly see in the spacing issues the word ‘even’ has. By disabling this feature things look a lot better. I hope an even better solution will come in Qt 5 but we’ll have to see.”
Thanks for the info. Even though I am kind of satisfied with the level of features/stability LibreOffice reached, I keep checking Calligra because of its potential speed/integration inside KDE. May give it a try when openSUSE 12.1 stabilize enough to trigger my upgrade cycle.
Ah, great. Remember back in the days when the year 2000 was in the future? It went on forever, and then when it was 2000, 2000 wasn’t the future. Bummer. Then we were promised decent font rendering in KWord some time in the future, and you say it’s here. And I’m like whoa, dude, we’re in the future.
The intrinsic problem in the font rendering was in Qt. Qt applied hinting “too early”. It needed changes in Qt to fix this problem, not KDE and not KOffice.
Historically, what did and did not get changed in Qt was up to Trolltech. In recent years, this control passed on to Nokia.
The Qt project has only very, very recently (late October 2011) just moved to open governance.
http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/21/kde-applauds-qts-move-open-governance
“Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt’s future for a long time and open governance will make this easier.”
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Qt-Switches-to-Open-Governance-22978…
So open governance (whereby what does and does not go into Qt is now governed by all who contribute to Qt) arrives for Qt, and within a month and a half this decade-old font rendering issue is fixed.
Make of this what you will.
Edited 2011-12-18 02:15 UTC