[rrd-developers] Re: --no-antialiasing and LINEx patches [was: Unsigned chars and optind]

[John]

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 22:00:18 +0200, Tobias Oetiker wrote:
> Yes, on the other hand in this case I guess there is no need to
> have different antialiasing propperties on a single canvas, I would
> rather like to see this added as a property of the canvas, and
> while we are at it, why not add a more generic option where once
> can select how freetype should render the font ...
> --font-render-mode={normal,light,mono}
> 
> this would fight the option explosion
In the back of my head I was actually thinking of
--antialiasing-threshold=x, which would disable antialiasing for font
sizes <= x. This makes sense, because it might be useful to have the
graph's title (which is large) anti-aliased, but the legend and so on
bitmapped.

Even if added as a global (canvas) property, it would require an extra
argument to many gfx_*-functions (like gfx_string_create), right?

As I see it, one could have both --antialiasing-threshold=x and
--font-render-mode={normal,light} ("mono" might be confusing with a
threshold-option). Obviously, this would add two options instead of
one, which isn't too good either. A "lcd" mode, FT_RENDER_MODE_LCD,
might be cool, but I'm afraid I don't know how to implement it.

Personally, I'll probably go with bitmapped all the way, so 
--font-render-mode=mono would suffice for me, but I believe a
threshold/strength pair is more common (used for example in 
Mac OS X).

Please tell me what you think and I'll try to update the patch.

> you have to update the *.pod files ...
OK.

> using currrent versions of freetype I have stopped using the
> bytecode interpreter because the output looks so good ... but if
> you can provide a patch for
> 
> --font-hinter={none,bytecode,auto}
> 
> I will be glad to include it too ... (with documentation)
The patended code, which I believe is superior, requires compile time
options. Hence, if the user (or the user's system) enabled the code
it's probably safe to assume that it should be used.

I'm using freetype-2.1.9, and the output with auto-hinting isn't
good at all if you ask me. The difference isn't that obvious for
VeraMono.ttf (although some characters, such as '8', look really odd
with auto-hinting), but for Verdana (and others) the difference is
_HUGE_.

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