Saturday, April 07, 2007

Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2

Finally, I have sub-pixel antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2. For some reason, it was turned off in the 10.2 release because of something being broken. I haven't been able to find out what. But yesterday I got tired of waiting for it to be fixed, so I downloaded the alpha freetype package from 10.3, only to find that it also has sub-pixel antialiasing turned off. No problem - I just installed the source package, replaced the tar files with version 2.3.3 ones, edited the spec file to enable sub-pixel rendering, disabled the freetype2-bitmap-foundry patch (because it wouldn't compile with it in there), rebuilt the rpm and installed it. Hey presto - sub-pixel rendering!

Last time I blogged about getting fonts to look better in 10.1, I had a load of comments telling me I should just turn of antialiasing because text looks better without it. Well, I like antialiasing, and especially sub-pixel antialiasing. On my 1900x1200 display it looks great. So there!

6 comments:

Robin said...

For the reason why it was disabled, look here:

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2007-04/msg00126.html

Anonymous said...

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2007-04/msg00126.html
"Note that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library."

Isn't it funny that this is valid for the US only while it wouldn't be a prob for everybody else to enable it per default? hmpf :-(

Dennie said...

The fact that you're using all the pixels on a TFT screen is filed under a patent? Maybe it's time we ignore that patent and let it be tested in court. This is ridiculous.

Paul said...

Yeah. It really is silly a US patent is dictating what is or isn't going into the package... sad.

I've had lots of problems with font ugliness under 10.2 and tried to install the newer freetype but things went bad. Could you possibly upload the RPM?

Unknown said...

Only if we can now get OpenOffice to display bytcoded fonts correctly - since 10.1 it seems broken.
I did all the font de-uglyfication (Tahoma, with no AA under 18px), but OOffice still displays Tahoma horribly.

Unknown said...

Only if we can now get OpenOffice to display bytcoded fonts correctly - since 10.1 it seems broken.
I did all the font de-uglyfication (Tahoma, with no AA under 18px), but OOffice still displays Tahoma horribly.