Firefox not using subpixel antialiasing?

wintermute222 · 03-14-2004, 04:23 PM

I'm using a GTK2/XFT build of FireFox 0.8. Most of the fonts look great, but bold fonts seem to be a bit strange. Some letters, like "o" and "g" are a bit too fat in places.

Is Firefox using subpixel antialiasing? Any recommendations on how to fix this?

(I'm using Gnome 2.4, and I've enabled subpixel antialiasing within the Font preferences tool.)

Pwnz3r · 03-14-2004, 05:30 PM

I emerged Mozilla Firefox from the sources and I used to use the pre-compiled version from Mozilla, but the emerge (Gentoo thing) which built the sources, made my fonts look much better and all of the programs that I use such as Totem, come up as options for viewing things which they didn't do in the pre-compiled version.

So get the sources and install it from the sources. That's your best bet.

wintermute222 · 03-14-2004, 05:50 PM

Perhaps I will try to compile it from source.

And, oddly enough, I only seem to have the problem in Gnome. KDE seems to render the fonts better within Firefox. But, I prefer Gnome, so that's not much use.

Pwnz3r · 03-14-2004, 05:52 PM

Yeah, I prefer GNOME as well and therefor will never emerge KDE since I'd never use it.

wintermute222 · 03-14-2004, 06:25 PM

Well...I've been wanting to try Gentoo anyway....perhaps I'll just install 2004.0 on my machine and see what happens.

I think I'll go buy a nifty SATA hard drive and dedicate that as my testbed for new distros.

wintermute222 · 03-15-2004, 12:09 AM

Ah. Turns out that the problem was with hinting of TrueType fonts. Apparently FreeType has possible patent issues with using the hinting contained within the fonts themselves.

If FreeType is recompiled with the Bytecode Interpreter on, then the fonts look much better. FreeType also mentions a non-patent-encumbered autohinter that must be flagged at runtime. I'll investigate that further.

Pwnz3r · 03-15-2004, 12:40 AM

Yeah, I converted a lot of fonts to type1 and they look a lot better. You can download the pack off of my site @ http://pstudios.vze.com if you want to. Gentoo has an advanced install process, but it's totally customizable so it's worth it anyway. I too am planning on buying a SATA harddrive as soon as possible, since they're faster and slightly cheaper than IDE drives.