Re: [Devel] postscript fonts, freetype and mozilla, redhat's great fonts

[David Turner]

Hello Michael,

Michael Cardenas wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 07:42:03PM -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote:
>
> > I see that in mozilla, redhat8 seems to be using the font Nimbus
> > Roman No 9 L. Looking at the output of xlsfonts -ll, I see that in
> > redhat 8, this font is being rasterized by freetype, but in lindows
> > os, it is being rasterized by X. So my first question is, how does one
> > get freetype to rasterize and anti alias postscript type 1 fonts?
>
> So can someone tell me how to get freetype to display antialiased
> postscript type 1 fonts? 
>
> I have /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 in my XftConfig, but I'm not
> sure what else has to be done. 
>
> The debian package is building the type1 module and linking it in. 
Well, FreeType only does the rendering, not the text layout and
display proper. What you really want to know is how applications
can display AA text ?

Generally, the toolkit they're using (GTK, Qt, others ?) must
use a library like "libXft" or "libXft2" that will manage most of
the X11 voodoo to use what FreeType renders.

  "libXft" and "libXft2" are not the same things. For more
  information, have a look at:

    http://www.freetype.org/david/unix-font-rendering.html

  GTK1 applications can't display AA text anyway, except with
  a linker trick called "gdkxft" or something similar, but
  the result is not always pleasant...

  GTK2 applications use the Pango library, which can be compiled
  in various baroque ways. One of them allows it to use "libXft2",
  which is the recommended way (and probably the default on
  recent versions of the library)

  Some versions of Qt2 are capable of using "libXft", but I don't
  know since which release number. This use is generally conditionned
  by certain environment variable settings, like QT_USE_XFT=1 or
  something similar. I don't have the details..

  I believe that Qt3 always uses "libXft2", but I could be wrong,
  and shouldn't pose problems..

  I don't know exactly how OpenOffice works

  There are some builds of Mozilla that use FreeType directly to
  render AA text. Some more recent builds use "libXft2" instead
  which probably is much better.. None of them are officially
  supported as far as I know.

Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)