Since some people are asking for packages I decided to go ahead and compile Dugan's slackbuilds and post the packages here. Just a little history first. The whole sub-pixel rendering thing started with a patch that was written by David Turner, the maintainer of freetype, however he didn't maintain the patch after cairo 1.2.4 and then others took his patch and modified to work with more recent versions of cairo and they also tweaked it to suite there needs. What ended up happening is that there ended up being 4 different patch sets for sub-pixel rendering, they were basically called

cleartype
LCD
xeffects
ubuntu

IMO they all looked pretty much the same with subtle differences. I used the LCD patches for a long time. After I made my original post Dugan did most of the leg work and tried out all the different patch sets until he found what he thought was the optimal quality for Slackware and I agree with his conclusion. As Dugan said earlier nothing has really changed since 12.1 so you can still use the patches (not packages) from the first post if you want, but I am recommending people use Dugans. Here are the packages if you don't feel like compiling yourself

http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/1...-i486-1_dc.tgz Make sure you do Dugan's changes stated above in post #92 for this package to work properly
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/1...-i486-2_dc.tgz
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/1...-i486-2_dc.tgz
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/1...-i486-3_dc.tgz

I am not going to host the firefox package since it takes up to much room on my site and technically if you compile firefox with the --enable-offical-branding flag you need permission from mozilla to distribute it, but you should compile it yourself otherwise this won't work since the version of firefox that ships with 12.2 uses its own internal cairo which bypasses all changes made. I also added one extra patch to cairo that disables quantization which I have always used and think makes a difference, but besides that they are exactly the same.


P.S. Dugan I hope you don't mind me hosting your builds as packages, if you don't want me to just let me know and I will take them down.

Of course I don't mind. In fact, since we're working with open source, I don't think I legally can.

However, I didn't do the testing. Gentoo users did. They made ebuilds that combined patches and information from everywhere. I just took a snapshot of their work and made it Slackware-ready.

Hey Daedra and Dugan, thanks for all your work on this. These packages make a huge difference from standard.

One (minor) change I'd make is to "package" the changes mentioned here:
It's easy enough to add these changes to the doinst.sh in the fontconfig package.

Anyhow, brilliant work! Thanks!

Just to mention it:

The cairo patch still works perfectly fine on Cairo 1.8.6.

(Just updated to try the cairo compositing manager which is now without Gnome dependencies... sadly it doesn't compile.. a well now I've got a recent Cairo anyway..)

Hello all

I just installed 12.2 (being a new Slackware user). What exactly am i supposed to do with the Slackbuilds and other files mentioned in post #98 ? Precise console commands would be appreciated

Please assist.

P.S. I just saw the packages at the top of this page. So the question remains, yet only for the firefox SlackBuild.

You just have to rebuild Firefox, because the out-of-the-box Firefox will not be linked against your shiny new Cairo with nicer font rendering enabled but against the libs included into Firefox' source package.

It's just the use of another configure flag:

--enable-system-cairo

which is enabled in the Slackbuild package.

Add other flags to your liking - I've disabled parental control for example and disabled two Gnome options (--disable-gnomeui --disable-gnomevfs).

i understand i have to rebuild Firefox. That would be ./configure / make / make install, right?
However, there are two things: a) the original source file (3.03) is a bit obsolete, so i am thinking i could use the latest one and, b) i do not know what to do with the files included in the Slackbuild. Please, be a little bit more verbose.

Thanks

Here, check this - that's all you have to know.

http://slackbuilds.org/howto/

Just grab the recent source of Firefox and do what the short tutorial says - in short:

Get the new source, adjust the configure-stuff if needed in the build-file, put the source in the Slackbuild-directory, change VERSION, call mozilla-firefox.SlackBuild.

Call installpkg for installation.

You are a life-saver.

Miss Kiss Kiss Bang, yes?

New SlackBuilds have been released and are available from post #92.

They've been rewritten, pretty significantly, to match the ebuilds in Gentoo's devnull overlay. So make sure you reread the post.

The Firefox SlackBuild has not been updated, but it should work with a VERSION bump.

Personally, I'm using GnomeSlackBuild, which includes a Cairo-enabled Firefox.

I've just installed Google's Android font "Droid" which is a) open source and comes b) in serif, sans and mono. (Really nice monospaced fonts aren't that easily available - especially not, if you need some internationalization..) Anyway:

This a screenshot of Droid Mono in vim with GUI linked against Gtk and therefore supported by our beloved beautiful font patches (hint style full) with the "quickbrownfox" example file for Unicode support.

Here's some sourcecode with the same font.

Download "Droid" here: CLICK

Throw it in ~/.fonts and call fb-cache -f -v and enjoy.

Shu-Shee, after reading your post I tried setting my sans, serif and monospace aliases to Droid fonts. The results are fantastic!

Glad you like it.

I'm very impressed by the very nice looking unicode support.

Slackbuild for fontconfig from post #92 not available. Please upload it anywhere.

Yes, Dugan seems to have taken the 'fontconfig' SlackBuild down from his download site. It contained quite a few configuration patches, so my guess is that he is revising it for compatibility reasons with new versions or something.

Bill.