No need

Posted Oct 22, 2009 17:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
In reply to: No need by mikov
Parent article: Monomania (Tux Deluxe)

>For example it looks absolutely horrible without anti-aliasing and small font sizes.

That's not so much the rendering, as the fonts (and the patent issue, in cases where you have well-hinted fonts but are stuck with the autohinter). Open-source fonts are all designed to be heavily anti-aliased, so they aren't well hinted.

I use Microsoft fonts and enable antialiasing for point sizes < 8 and > 14, and I'm very happy with the result as long as I blacklist a handful of fonts that I hate but can't uninstall for silly package dependency reasons.

If you're hoping for better rendering at size 6 with no anti-aliasing, then you'd better have some extraordinarily well-hinted fonts I think, and the patented bytecode interpreter enabled.

No need

Posted Oct 22, 2009 18:27 UTC (Thu) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link]

I am not really complaining about regular desktop usage - my Linux desktop actually looks fine to me; although perhaps some of that is force of habit. I don't deal with visual design, so I am OK as long as it is just acceptable.

But occasionally I notice problems:

- Even though I have the Microsoft fonts, web pages in Firefox look different in Windows (and arguably better, although it is naturally subjective).

- If I disable anti-aliasing completely in the desktop it becomes really horrible. Of course there is no reason to do it, except as an experiment. But it is still depressing. Windows 2000 really looks beautiful and crisp by comparison. As I said, depressing...

- Changing the anti-aliasing settings affects page formatting. I find that very strange.

Back to my initial point, Java's proprietary font rendering exhibits none of these problems, so replacing it with Freetype, while unavoidable, nevertheless could be viewed as a disadvantage in some contexts.