On Monday 31 January 2005 03:57 pm, Christopher Carlen wrote:
Bruce Marshall wrote:
I did the above and things look a lot better (in Kmail for example) but now OO (1.1.4, not the SuSE version) looks really bad. Of course it's not using TT fonts so I don't think it's doing any AA'ing...
The acid test for correct font rendering is to turn off anti-aliasing and then evaluate their appearance. The pixelated fonts should look symmetric and not rough.
This is best viewed on an LCD.
Once it is verified that the hinting is done right, then turn on anti-aliasing if desired.
Understand, the bytecode interpreter is NOT needed for antialiasing, only proper hinting using the font's embedded bytecodes. The antialiased fonts do look "tighter" though, with the bytecode interpreter, so it improves antialiased display as well.
Be certain also that subpixel hinting is operating correctly, for Trinitron and LCD displays. Subpixel hinting is really cool. It tightens up the appearance of the fonts considerably as well. Oh, OpenOffice can't use subpixel hinting, as of Suse 9.1 and it's Suse compiled OOo package. This sucks for antialiasing fans. I turn off my antialiasing in OOo, because it looks too blurry without subpixel hinting.
Regarding OpenOffice:
In the past versions, it was possible to use a command like:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so soffice&
to get OOo to use the system's recompiled Freetype library, which would make OOo display TTF fonts properly.
I notice that I don't have this preload in my OOo application field in my KDE icon right now, but I know that my OOo is using the good libfreetype.so . So perhaps it isn't necessary to do this with Suse's OOo, but a vanilla OOo from OO.org might benefit from this. Back in the 1.0.x versions of OOo this was explained somewhere on their site.
Note also:
OOo is wierd. Sometimes after you recompile Freetype, OOo still renders fonts poorly. It seems it does some internal caching (or maybe it has something to do with the linker, I dunno) and until it decides to start over, the recompiled lib's effects aren't seen.
The only solution I've found is to restart OOo a few times. If it loads again real quickly, probably the effects of the new Freetype won't be seen. If it loads like it's loading for the first time, then the new Freetype will be working. Loading another large program before restarting OOo can help with this, which is also why I suspect it may have something to do with the linker/loader rather than OOo itself.
Good day!
Lots of good information there... thanks!! One question: When I had OO running with the recompiled freetype2, it showed all of its fonts in the font list as 'AA' but I lost the use of Arial (a favorite) and probably some others. Arial just wasn't in the list. Which made me think that something in the setup was wrong. I did find some fonts which looked ok but maybe most were just strange to me because I don't normally use them. All of this was viewed on an LCD. Firefox fonts looked pretty good, Kmail fonts were good I guess but I ended up with a different set again than what I was used to. Will play with it some more.....