LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 6, 2010 10:36 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: LPC: Life after X by elanthis
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

1080p is far more than a video player needs, but it is far less than most apps need.

Because most apps display text, and clean text rendering requires a lot more pixels than that (not to mention that all the current tricks to mitigate the effects of the lack of pixels for text rely on knowing exactly the hardware pixel layout, something you can't do with a generic image protocol)

Image protocols are good enough only if you restrict remoting to special emergency users where text redered like crap does not matter.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 6, 2010 11:43 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Completely hypothetically:

Why couldn't there be a negotiation that describes the optimal pixel format so that GUI programs could render their text optimally?

Also text doesn't change all the time, so it probably takes far less bandwidth to deal with than video in average, because you only have to transmit the pixels once, and then user spends a lot of time reading. If you know you're dealing with text (say, because the user told you so) you could disable lossy compression schemes too.

Favorite rant of mine:

Not that I expect introduction of Wayland to result in good text rendering on Linux. The text layering on window image has always been treated as a gamma=1.0 alphablending problem on Linux, the end result being awful color fringing and varying weight on diagonals. These problems are not going to go away until someone finally designs it right from day one.

All I can hope for is that by complaining about this eventually someone will wake up and design a text layering pipeline that can do gamma-corrected alphablending. Until that way, our fonts will continue to suck. There has been some hope recently with sRGB surface support specced in OpenGL, so I can only hope and beg that this flag will get turned on whenever a bitmap representing text is about to get combined with underlying graphics.

Color Management in a Wayland World

Posted Nov 7, 2010 15:06 UTC (Sun) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]

There is a link to the mailing list from the project site here: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

Nothing is mentioned in any of the documentation I've been able to find and I think it's valid to ask who's doing color management. Wayland appears to be oblivious to the issue and pushing it into every client seems like a mistake.

I hear this issue is basically solved on the OSX display server and whatever comes after X needs to have parity here. The problem may be most obvious in fonts and antialiasing, but it's certainly not limited to it.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 6, 2010 13:00 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Errr, what are you talking about?

Most displays today is less than 1920x1080, and by far the most apps needs less than that.