Re: OpenGL, xserver, and anti-aliased fonts

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 12:45:47PM +1100, catach-m/[email protected] wrote:
| I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts (or feel thier nudges in the right
| direction!) ...

Like Carl said, check the archives for the first week of November; there
was lots of discussion then.

Personally, I'm biased toward using geometric primitives (as opposed to
image primitives) as much as possible -- there's much better hardware
acceleration for them, they permit cleaner interaction between text and
other objects, they can be used in compact display lists, they introduce
fewer order-dependencies than image compositing, there may be
opportunities to exploit the programmability of current-generation
graphics chips, etc.  But there are also performance disadvantages on
desktop hardware older than three years and on hardware without
floating-point, so I suspect mine is a minority opinion.

Regardless of the rendering method you use, you'll need to be careful
about hinting, subpixel positioning, and gamma correction.

Just for proof-of-concept, if you take a look at the graphs on

	http://arden.org/solar

They're rendered using OpenGL.  The text in the axis labels and captions
is antialiased.  It's drawn using a multipass method with all-positive
filter kernel weights that I generated as part of a small optimization
experiment.  I think the rendering parameters are decent for a CRT
adjusted to meet the specs of sRGB, but would need to be changed
slightly for LCD.

Again, there was much more detailed discussion back in November.

Allen