Seen at Ximian’s Federico Mena-Quintero blog: GTK+’s Owen Taylor posted an interesting study on how to render nice fonts on a resolution-independent screen. It seems that Red Hat is gearing up to compete with Longhorn’s features. Elsewhere, Søren Sandmann posted a good list of interaction problems in GTK+ that individual hackers might enjoy fixing.
Rendering Good Looking Text with Resolution-Independent Layout
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Eugenia Loli
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If Longhorn does that nicely and Linux can’t be then I will be very tempted to convert…
*Linux can’t by then
Apple already has it.
I guess people wont use it unless it is on an x86 box
You know? I’d recommend everyone read the article. It just goes to show that while everyone’s arguing out here. Someone is silently solving the problem(s).
@BR: Exactly. And what an interesting problem.
Erik
That article mentions and shows screenshots of the autohinter in use.
Does FC1 and FC2 use the autohinter?
You have to have the proper hardware before the system can implement these text enhancements, they said something about DX-10.
Wow!
I am glad that developer see exactly the same problems as users do. I for one have at least 4 or 5 bugs at that page also listed in my wishlist, ex: dragndrop issue, resize area, cursor update problems, too fast scrolling and tooltip problems.
Actually the resize area being too small, icon dragging threshold and too fast scrolling are the biggest things keeping me using Linux more than Wİndows. These problems are there in KDE too unfortunately, plus KDE has a awful flicker problem
Hopefully they all get fixed by next releases.
my 2 sents
This, along with Freedesktop X-server, Reiser4 and GNOME storage will make “Longhorn” look a lot less long. Fedora core 2’s fonts look excellent as well, turn the hinting on to full in the font preferences!
New hardware will allow you to have better fonts, more evenly spaced, special fonts like H20 but with the number 2 in small print, or whatever it’s called. You can do that stuff now with LATEX though.
Unfortunately, no-one’s thought to use TeX-/METAFONT-tech for widgets etc. I don’t know why.
“This, along with Freedesktop X-server […]”
it has become awfully quiet around it since 6 months or so. its mailing-list is also not very frequented.
anyone with any insight into the progress being made?
i could imagine because this is such a complex project, that they’re lacking of manpower.
also, i wonder how it fits (if at all) together with suns java-stuff – complimentary or direct competition?
besides, at least regarding gtk, i would like to see some speedimprovement about 30% or so. it still feels very heavy compared to windows.
He’s also made a list of GTK+ menu problems at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/menuproblems . Beware though, it’s in Danish (I can read Danish, but not so many do
” It seems that Red Hat is gearing up to compete with Longhorn’s features.”
where does it seem like redhat is gearing up to do that?
Why do people care if Sun or Microsoft or any specific vendor makes a lot of money? How many of you are owners of these companies?
1. New hardware will allow software to take advantage of the new hardware, is this unique to any one system? The advertising will have you believe so, but the reality is that any system for which software is written to take advantage of the new hardware does so, and it’s not innovation, it’s progress.
> Unfortunately, no-one’s thought to use TeX-/METAFONT-tech for widgets etc. I don’t know why.
I think rasterizing Metafont from the outlines still requires a lot more computing power than TrueType/Type 1. That’s why it’s not suitable for real-time display.
Since some of you started to talk about Freedesktop.org, I’d thought I’d ask something. Sorry for going off topic.
How come Freedesktop.org doesn’t mention the Equinox Desktop Environment at their desktops section. Also does anyone know what happened the “Cosmoe” project? http://www.cosmoe.com/ That site hasn’t been updated for ages. That project made a lot of noise when it first started. I am very sorry for going off topic. Hopefully no one mods me down.
Apple already has it. ?? i disagree!
—
i’m still watching at mediocre text-smoothing in os-x … hinting is shabby, small fonts look blurry. AND user got no decent control over fonts in os-x (i know that’s OT)
some screenshots of fedora core (posted here awhile ago) showed one of the best rendered desktop-fonts i know. esp. at small sizes, bc. that’s what matters.
i would LOVE a fully resolution independant display where i could just use a sliderbar to set up how large i want the windows/fonts/widgets/etc…
Cosmoe is progressing.
Best is you read their mailinglist at:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/cosmoe
Thank you very much for carrying this report. This is one thing that has been turning me away from distros, I have tried RHEL SUSE Mandrake. This whole thing about Freetype BCI, well even with BCI enabled I am not able to get a good quality fonts in KDE. I guess Suse Pro 9.1 did some work on improving the fonts but still not quite. I think Linux has a long way to go even to look close to Windows 98. I mean forget about anti-aliasing just plain display of fonts is still not uniform.
Nonsense, the fonts are just fine, invest in some new glasses.
The issue is hardware technology. The new hardware specification will naturally allow software to render better fonts for all basic output. You want great fonts use LATEX but that is a specialization, with new hardware improvements the font quality will become ubiquitious.
How did the fonts of Windows 98 look beautiful? They weren’t anti-aliased by default, and the optional anti-aliasing was only applied to very small and large fonts.
Windows XP has sub-pixel rendering, but does it the wrong way around (BGR) on my flatpanel so that the fonts look blurry and interlaced, and the vertical lines appear to be green…
In Gnome and KDE this is customisable, however, so that fonts render much nicer on them than on XP. You just need to have the right fonts, as the Luxi fonts won’t look nice with any font renderer.
All in all, I just don’t see what is so great about Windows’ font rendering: either no sub-pixel rendering or in the wrong way.
Oops, should have read the notes of the article – with that font renderer, even Luxi Sans looks nice!
“Nonsense, the fonts are just fine, invest in some new glasses.”
DAH Get the facts right guys If I need glasses then you must be blind not to see the problem with the fonts. Ok before I do further bashing here are the facts, and before you jump on to a conclusion go do some research. I have a Toshiba Satellite with 15″ LCD( Yes this is what makes the difference) And yes I have spent the whole of last month( in my free time) to get to have a decent fonts on my laptop. And if any of you think any of the Stock Linux releases are good in Fonts, I beg to differ. In almost all of them I had to recompile Freetype 2 with BCI enabled, and tweak mozilla to use MS core ttf fonts to display proper fonts.
I see there’s a small list of animations(popup menus, combo boxes etc.) in the document that could be implemented.
Why on earth ? Animations here serves no purpose other than
annoy users about the delay in my opinion. Sure some other OS’es have them, and it’s the first thing I tend to turn off.
Where’s the usability studies on these features ?
Uhm, I see pretty fonts being rendered using Freetype. Especially Figure 7 looks great. If freetype can already do that, what must I do to get Freetype to render like that on my Gentoo box?
Luxi Sans at the same size as the screenshot doesn’t look anywhere near as nice on my box.
>> Why on earth ? Animations here serves no purpose other
>> than annoy users about the delay in my opinion.
Please, think out of the box you’re living in.
Animations are not just meant to delay users, neither are they solely meant for making things look nice and cool.
Just like drop shadows are good for making windows stand out from other windows on the desktop, animations are good for making sure the user doesn’t get dis-oriented in many ways (personally I’m suffering from this issue a lot when using listviews, treeviews and editviews).
Well in Gnome that’s fairly easy.
Applications – Prederences – Fonts.
After that just experiment a little bit with Font Rendering (for more accurate setting go to Details).
Actually, funny thing is that probably you’ll see better (and cleaner) some other shape and rendering as some friend of yours. I noticed that when I was setting this for my friends. Not even two agreed on the best setting and funny thing is that sometimes someone complains about fonts being shaded from the side, while the other one does that when first says it’s cool. From that I gather that best rendering must be related to eyes and their specifics which are different from person to person.
Ugh. I turn off all drop shadows and animations. Regardless of what WM I use.
How come Freedesktop.org doesn’t mention the Equinox Desktop Environment at their desktops section. Also does anyone know what happened the “Cosmoe” project? http://www.cosmoe.com/ That site hasn’t been updated for ages. That project made a lot of noise when it first started. I am very sorry for going off topic. Hopefully no one mods me down.
Why should anyone mod you down. I’m sure everyone would like to know.
Animations help the user figuring out what’s going on. In the real world, objects don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. It isn’t actually very clear what happened when you expand a tree branch. and most of the window changes from one instant to another.
Note that Microsoft’s animations aren’t particularly good. They generally take too long to complete and they don’t react to input events dynamically. I do agree that the animations on Windows (<= 2000, I haven’t tried XP a lot) are generally annoying.
All in all, I just don’t see what is so great about Windows’ font rendering: either no sub-pixel rendering or in the wrong way.
You might want to know that this webpage:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/1.htm
allows you to tweak ClearType, in text sharpness and the subpixel order (RGB or BGR). It works in IE only though, due to an ActiveX control.
I know exactly what you are talking about. Even if you have the truetype fonts installed in KDE or GNOME, with the BCI enabled, you will still have the jagged ugly font problem. The problem, as far as I can tell, is in the ugly Helvetica font that ships with Xfree. Once I installed decent truetype Helvetica fonts, I was finally able to read web pages without having my eyes bleed. I won’t go into my personal rant about XFree STILL shipping that ancient wretched Helvetica font. Just install some decent Helvetica truetype fonts and you shouldn’t have problems with this again, or at least, it worked for me.
”
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/1.htm
allows you to tweak ClearType, in text sharpness and the subpixel order (RGB or BGR). It works in IE only though, due to an ActiveX control.”
i am not going to use anything with an activex control
Now why did XP default to BGR if the Microsoft page you link to, says that “BGR – very rare”? And why isn’t there a normal GUI option to make things work on the majority of displays?
Now I don’t have Windows XP installed anymore, but NetBSD 2.0 Beta instead, with Gnome. And now I see that Gnome+Pango+Freetype has a problem as well: when I enable sub-pixel rendering, it decides to put a pale yellow bar at the left of all black vertical lines, even though I have RGB!
And yes, I know I have RGB because that is what looks by far the best on that Microsoft page.
Oh fine, it must have been another stupid GNOME bug – now that I selected BGR it does render the fonts properly 😐
Yes, I have checked with XMag. When I select BGR, it displays blue lines on the left and yellow ones on the right. So if I would select RGB on my RGB screen, I would get this:
RGB-RGB-RGB instead of: RGB-RGB-RGB
Xx XXX x x XXX Xx
which I get when I select BGR. I would say that anyone who makes a GUI control panel for subpixel rendering would have an LCD to test it, or at least check with XMag. Do I expect too much?
“which I get when I select BGR. I would say that anyone who makes a GUI control panel for subpixel rendering would have an LCD to test it, or at least check with XMag. Do I expect too much?”
its not required. any zooming control would do
I know exactly what you are talking about. Even if you have the truetype fonts installed in KDE or GNOME, with the BCI enabled, you will still have the jagged ugly font problem.
Just a note: if you want nice anti-aliased fonts in KDE (and presumably GNOME as well), don’t turn on the Byte Code Interpreter, but use Freetype’s autohinter instead (it comes standard with Freetype v2.1.7, IIRC).
This provides with very nice looking fonts at high resolutions, much nicer than with the BCI.
The problem, as far as I can tell, is in the ugly Helvetica font that ships with Xfree. Once I installed decent truetype Helvetica fonts, I was finally able to read web pages without having my eyes bleed. I won’t go into my personal rant about XFree STILL shipping that ancient wretched Helvetica font.
Well, legally, they can’t include the real Helvetica font, nor can they include Arial (MS’s approximation of Helvetica). They could ship with Vera Sans instead…
To me it looks like apple has Figure 5.
Fonts in osx are very well shaped, but fuzzy. Great for large sizes, but too blurry for small sizes (ie what most web pages use). I am constantly fiddling with the font zoom in safari to get to font big enough to evercome the fuzzyness.
“Well, legally, they can’t include the real Helvetica font, nor can they include Arial (MS’s approximation of Helvetica). They could ship with Vera Sans instead…”
I know. I just think it is silly to have to download truetype Helvetica separately. Since so many versions of truetype Helvetica are available for free download on the net, I wish someone would donate a set to X.org. If only I knew how to design fonts (sigh).
I think rasterizing Metafont from the outlines still requires a lot more computing power than TrueType/Type 1. That’s why it’s not suitable for real-time display.
But for each resolution and point size, they only need to be rasterised once and cached. Why couldn’t the most common sizes and resolutions be pre-rasterised?
Actually, I was wrong! Of course, the letters are black, so the yellow line should indeed be on the left. But still, yellow lines next to all letters isn’t very pretty. It would be better if they moved all letters about 1/4 pixel to the right, I think.
Btw. Vera Sans looks quite well in X/freetype, indeed.
I finally resolved the ugly font problem. I turned of the anti aliasing off and use Truetype BCI and use Tahoma Fonts from MS Corefonts. Boy what a difference in readability, I am finally totally into Linux. WOOHOO
Apple has NO HINTING whatsoever, which was the whole point of the article. That is why very small fonts suck in OS X.
A nun, he moos wrote:
>Well, legally, they can’t include the real Helvetica font, nor can they include Arial (MS’s approximation of Helvetica).
Can’t they? I though http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ was the whole point about it.
“Can’t they? I though http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ was the whole point about it.”
READ THE LICENSE!! (duh!) It says you’re not allowed to distribute anything but the original unmodified self-extracting .exe. Plus, it may not be distributed for profit, which makes it even more impossible for commercial distributions to distribute.
It’s called obeying the law!
Hi!
I don’t want to be negative here… i’m using Linux since gnome was 1.2. At the beginning, I was very pleased with AA fonts, I tought it was inovation. Then Windows XP got the ClearType thing which I think is much better…
Spacing:
In Gnome (Don’t know for KDE or other windows manager), the spacing of the fonts looks weird. Sometime, two letters are so close we think it’s one (ie: com looks like corn)
Bold:
The bold are simply ugly (IMHO). They looks a little bit “squared”.
I think improving the fonts on Linux is a very important steps. I’ll try to post some sreenshots to prove these points. Anyone notice the same and have the same impression? Maybe I missed something, would anyone share their tricks?!
Best Regards,
Martin