<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 5:18 PM, Jud Craft <<a href="mailto:craftjml@gmail.com">craftjml@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hello there, thanks for reading. This may be a bad place for this post, I apologize if so. Here's the problem, stated over and over throughout bad forum posts: subpixel-rendering on Fedora is a little sub-par. The chief reason (from my lay perspective) is that it doesn't implement the various cleartype-like filtering algorithms demonstrated in all sorts of questionable patches, due to fear of patent-infringing on Microsoft's Cleartype work. This means Fedora's default subpixel-rendering is full of color-fringes and in general less smooth than other algorithms shown in (for example) Debian and Ubuntu. Currently the only solutions are: 1. Try out freetype-freeworld: restores the bytecode interpreter to Freetype and some adds filtering, patent-infringing, stuck in RPMFusion, can't be merged into Fedora. 2. Try out those peculiar cleartype-patches flying around the forums: you get all filtering functionality back, but again, patent infringement. Okay, here's something different. Check this out: Qt (that other GUI toolkit) actually developed their own method to reduce the color fringing on subpixel-rendering: <a href="http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/01/subpixel-antialiasing-on-x11/" target="_blank">http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/01/subpixel-antialiasing-on-x11/</a> Qt is not perfect (their filter automatically locks you into full-hinting on Qt 4.4, but that'll be fixed in 4.5), but their method (without using any other patent-infringing algorithms) is very beneficial. You'll note their un-filtered examples look just as bad as the current filtering in GTK in Fedora, while their fixed-examples look pretty decent. So here's the idea: perhaps Fedora could petition Pango (I think that's the system GTK uses to render glyphs) to include the Qt-filtering style in their own upstream code. This would mean that both GUI toolkits on the Linux desktop would then have patent-free, non-color-fringing, subpixel rendering by default. And today currently, keep in mind that Qt on Fedora already has this new filtering, so I don't think there are any patent-problems with it: Qt's solution seems to be a simple blur of their own ingenuity, and nothing related to Cleartype. (Otherwise Fedora wouldn't ship it, I'd assume). -- fedora-devel-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-devel-list@redhat.com">fedora-devel-list@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list" target="_blank">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list</a> </blockquote></div> <div>A good idea yes, but the reason why Fedora and other USA-based distros have such bad font rendering is because the hinting algorithms in freetype are patented not by Microsoft, but by Apple. <a href="http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html">http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html</a></div> <div> </div><div>Meh, ClearType is just the same as the subpixel hinting that is patented by Apple, just a different name.</div>