FreeType 2.6.2 Brings Changes To Rendering Fonts On LCD Screens

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeType 2.6.2 Brings Changes To Rendering Fonts On LCD Screens

FreeType 2.6.2 was released this weekend as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source library for text/font rendering...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeType-2.6.2-Released

[brent]

That's all very nice, but many distributions still disable LCD filtering and/or subpixel rendering completely... because patents.

[behrz]

By looking at the samples on FreeType's article, the older one looked better to me... Plus they even mention the newer looking blurrier. We'll have to wait and see it for real, but I hope it doesn't look like those screenshots.

[carewolf]

Well, we can't really do linear blending of the output of freetype, it is already adjusted to work without naive blending, which makes linear blending looks really blurry.

Have they added a flag we can use to get an output suited for linear blending?

Edit: Ahh, they plan to add such a setting later. Great.

[xeekei]

Is this already in Arch? I thought I noticed something with the font rendering before reading this article.

[Cerberus]

Good thing Ubuntu does its own font rendering patches, default font rendering on most Linux distributions is
...less than acceptable, especially how fonts in web browsers look like. Ubuntu and OSX have the best font rendering, looking at the same webpages in Ubuntu then in Windows on the same browser...Ubuntu wins.

[FuturePilot]

That's all very nice, but many distributions still disable LCD filtering and/or subpixel rendering completely... because patents.

Which I still don't understand because I thought those patents expired?

[Awesomeness]

That's all very nice, but many distributions still disable LCD filtering and/or subpixel rendering completely... because patents.

Microsoft own a few patents for ClearType (see http://www.freetype.org/patents.html) but considering that ClearType is utter garbage, it doesn't matter anyway and with "retina" displays on the rise, all BS like sub-pixel rendering is going away anyway.

[Cerberus]

Microsoft own a few patents for ClearType (see http://www.freetype.org/patents.html) but considering that ClearType is utter garbage, it doesn't matter anyway and with "retina" displays on the rise, all BS like sub-pixel rendering is going away anyway.

Not anytime soon, there is A LOT of laptops with non full HD screens still on sale and they arent going away anytime soon, "retina" laptops are very rare if you exclude MacBooks. Most still have 1366x768 and 1600x900, even 24" monitor with 1080p (by far most common type) benefits from hinting. It took years to get 1080p as most widely used standard, and laptops are still not there, it will take years before 2k and 4k become most widely used monitors and eliminate the need for improved font rendering.

[Guest]

I haven't been using antialiased font rendering in Linux for many years, and I plan to keep doing so.

Waiting for 4K displays (24+ inches) to get cheaper in order to get better-looking text ...