Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support *yet* [LWN.net]

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support yet

Posted Jun 26, 2009 4:49 UTC (Fri) by colinb (guest, #59303)
In reply to: Rhaaa, yet another font format! by colinb
Parent article: GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Also, a quick correction to the article, which states:

With respect to the technical qualities of GRUB 2, Rintel is mostly impressed about GRUB 2's modular architecture. He calls other features such as the graphics subsystem with mouse support capable of rendering antialiased Unicode glyphs "hardly things that would convince anyone to switch to GRUB 2".

Actually, mouse support has not been added yet, though USB support has recently been added, and I'm about to commit the graphical menu branch to GRUB's mainline, so mouse support is not far off. Rendering antialiased text is not supported with the current bitmap-based fonts. If and when we add support for font rendering with FreeType, then we will have antialiased text rendering.

Regards,

Colin

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Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support *yet*

Posted Nov 13, 2009 14:01 UTC (Fri) by evgenyz (guest, #61962) [Link]

So, why you then just don't make this bitmap font 8-bit/pixel? With such an alpha channel you can do anti-aliasing in compile (font conversion, huh) time and simply draw it in run time ("...making the code to read the font simple than we are with writing the font.").

Size? Just complete LZMA! It will be far more simple (and faster) to implement than OpenType rendering in run time.