Re: What backend should be the default now on -nix?

[Adrian Robert]

On Oct 28, 2004, at 3:17 PM, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Adrian Robert wrote:
>
> > On the Xlib back end, is there an obstacle to setting anti-aliased 
> > fonts on by default?  I personally only noticed this capability after 
> > months, and don't imagine this is that unusual among general users.  
> > Ideally, anti-alias should default to ON, but the code should 
> > autodetect if libfreetype is absent in in this case fall back to 
> > non-antialiased.
>
> It may be just me that prevented this :-)
>
> Although I implemented the original AA support for xlib (now extended 
> with great patches by Derek Zhou. BTW: There is still one I always 
> forget to commit) I don't use it myself and this may have blocked it 
> from becomming the default. To be honest, I don't liek AA fonts, most 
> of the time they just look bad. But if you, and a few others, really 
> want them as the default, I don't mind to switch them on, I know how 
> to switch them off for myself anyway.

I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) OS X and Windows XP have 
anti-aliasing ON by default (and have control panel options to turn it 
off or limit it to certain font sizes.  That would provide additional 
motivation for the AA-on option, although the control panel would be 
just an on/off switch (as we have now) since rendering parameters are 
controlled by freetype's configuration.


> One thing to keep in mind: Our autodetection code for libfreetype is 
> at compile time not runtime.

This might be a showstopper -- if a binary distribution needs to be 
preset for non-antialiased or it won't work on a system without 
freetype, that could be a problem.  Would bundle-izing the freetype 
rendering code support clean runtime selection?  This would take some 
work though, and some might think this effort would be better directed 
towards improving the art backend..