Le mardi 25 octobre 2011 à 13:38 +0200, Takashi Iwai a écrit :
At Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:15:04 +0400, Ilya Chernykh wrote:
On Tuesday 25 October 2011 02:08:52 Takashi Iwai wrote:
Sub-pixel hinting needs that the feature to be anabled in two files Xresources and fonts.conf. This will affect the most applications. Neither of them have subpixel hinting enabled in openSUSE 12.1. I just do not know why. Possibly, some patent issues, or there are people who are against subpixels.
It's because the subpixel rendering is only for LCDs. On other displays (or when setting a wrong value), it causes a problem.
The majority of displays now are LCDs.
This doesn't justify to *break* something working now.
And, some people do hate the subpixel rendering pretty much, as it leaves some artificial colors.
So, it's still risky to enable it *as default*.
It has been done in Ubuntu for a long time and I did not see much people who hates Ubuntu fonts out there.
How do you know? There are lots of people who hate Ubuntu :)
Actually, the system installation may be a bit more clever. We can detect the monitor at the installation time, and it'd be possible to know whether the subpixel rendering is enabled or not.
Of course, this is apart from the patent issues. I don't know whether the subpixel patent was expired. I do know the bytecode-interpreter patent was expired. (And Ubuntu tends to ignore any patents intentionally as tradition.)
LCD subpixel is disabled by default upstream. See upstream opinion at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype/2006-09/msg00064.html
However, on its website, freetype states :
"The colour filtering algorithm of Microsoft's ClearType technology for
subpixel rendering is covered by patents. Note that subpixel rendering
per se is prior art; using a different colour filter thus circumvents
Microsoft's patent claims."
--
Frederic Crozat