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Constant UI responsivenessConstant UI responsivenessPosted Feb 27, 2009 9:10 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793)In reply to: Constant UI responsiveness by eru Parent article: CrunchBang Linux 8.10
By being anti-aliased it means they have to "alpha-blend" the character bitmap with the background and foreground color, which is several times slower than the simple case they had to do before. I don't believe this was used on 8-bit color displays, as it would add a "dithering" step.
Scalable fonts just add a step in the generation of the characters, which can then be put in cache and only hurt performance the first time they are generated. And some scalable formats included pre-generated bitmaps for the common sizes. Windows would happily return a font of this already generated sizes, instead of generating a new one, if the size we wanted was close enough.
Anyway, just to point out one of the many things we now take for granted that are possible because we have the CPU power, and the memory, for it.
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Constant UI responsiveness Posted Mar 1, 2009 5:56 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Anti-aliased text would not really be needed much if the Linux font scaling would work better (like as well as in Windows 3.1). The big obstacle here is of course the infamous software patent that prevents FreeType from working as well as it could. Another is the quality of free fonts, until very recently.In the past, I found the display looking much better for me, if I recompiled FreeType with the "illegal" bits of code enabled, and then turned antialiasing off. Without this the letters would be irritatingly fuzzy. Lately I have not bothered, mainly because larger display resolutions make the antialiasing fuzz less offensive.
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