Antialiased fonts in Mozilla?
William McBrine
precompiled Linux i686 binary from mozilla.org, but I'm ready to compile
it if necessary... I've got antialiased fonts in KDE and Gnome, but only
Konqueror lets me use them in a browser. This is a Mandrake 8.0 system,
partly upgraded, with XFree86 4.1.0.
--
William McBrine <wmcb...@telocity.com>
Vladimir Florinski
> How do enable antialiased fonts in Mozilla 1.0? I'm using the
> precompiled Linux i686 binary from mozilla.org, but I'm ready to compile
> it if necessary... I've got antialiased fonts in KDE and Gnome, but only
> Konqueror lets me use them in a browser. This is a Mandrake 8.0 system,
> partly upgraded, with XFree86 4.1.0.
Edit the Mozilla configuration file
(/usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref/unix.js). There are some comments in the
file that will give you an idea which lines to change. I should say,
however, that when I tried AA fonts in Mozilla, they looked a lot worse
than without AA. Perhaps after some effort one could come up with more
satisfactory settings, but I just don't have the time to spend on it.
--
Vladimir
lobotomy
1. Use mozilla's internal freetype support. The instructions were given
in another reply to your post. The good thing about this is it is
included in every mozilla binary, and you can use it with truetype fonts
even if you don't have them installed in X. The downside is that its not
hardware-accelerated using Xrender, and the quality is worse than
XFree86's native Xft antialiasing (especially if you are using an LCD
display and have rgb subpixel antialiasing turned on for Xft).
2. Use the gdkxft hack. This is probably what you are using with gnome
now. It doesn't work with normal mozilla binaries, though, you need to
install a version compiled with a patch available from
gdkxft.sourceforge.net. This uses native Xft rendering and the quality is
exactly what you are getting from GNOME and KDE right now. Unfortunately
there is some bad corruption of certain characters (especially punctuation
and accent marks) that make it practically unusable in some circumstances.
3. Use a version of mozilla patched with native Xft support. This is the
best solution...Mozilla uses Xft to render fonts natively, it looks just
as good as the gdkxft version but without the display problems. You can
get source and binary RPMs from:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/experimental/xft/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/1.0/
I haven't tried this myself for a couple of reasons -- I don't use an RPM
distribution, and I don't have the CVS version of Xfree86 needed to
compile it against (it uses Xft version 2, which is not compatible with
the version in all release versions of Xfree86). Lucky for you, you
should be able to run the binaries without having this installed, so you
might want to give it a try.
In <uhjo4qh...@corp.supernews.com>, William McBrine wrote:
> How do enable antialiased fonts in Mozilla 1.0? I'm using the
> precompiled Linux i686 binary from mozilla.org, but I'm ready to compile
> it if necessary... I've got antialiased fonts in KDE and Gnome, but only
> Konqueror lets me use them in a browser. This is a Mandrake 8.0 system,
> partly upgraded, with XFree86 4.1.0.
--
Not to have been a dupe, that will have been my best possesion, my best
deed, to have been a dupe, wishing I wasn't, thinking I wasn't, knowing
I was, not being a dupe of not being a dupe.
--Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Hal Burgiss
> 2. Use the gdkxft hack. This is probably what you are using with
> gnome now. It doesn't work with normal mozilla binaries, though, you
> need to install a version compiled with a patch available from
> gdkxft.sourceforge.net. This uses native Xft rendering and the quality
> is exactly what you are getting from GNOME and KDE right now.
> Unfortunately there is some bad corruption of certain characters
> (especially punctuation and accent marks) that make it practically
> unusable in some circumstances.
Hmmm...I've heard of the corruption, but not not seen it personally.
Maybe this effects non-English charsets? I've used this for about 6
months or so with no ill side effects that I can detect.
Also, the posted patch for Mozilla broke with 0.98 IIRC, and last I
looked he is not maintaining this any more. Shame. I have updated the
tiny patch and have RH7 spec file + patch for Mozilla 1.0. Also, rpms
but I am reluctant to post those due the beastly size :/
> I haven't tried this myself for a couple of reasons -- I don't use an RPM
> distribution, and I don't have the CVS version of Xfree86 needed to
> compile it against (it uses Xft version 2, which is not compatible with
> the version in all release versions of Xfree86). Lucky for you, you
> should be able to run the binaries without having this installed, so you
> might want to give it a try.
Does this work for widgets and browser window? (if you know, that is).
--
Hal Burgiss
lobotomy
> On Wed, 26 Jun 2002 20:30:48 GMT, lobotomy <foon_NO@SPAM_killall.net>
> wrote:
>
> Hmmm...I've heard of the corruption, but not not seen it personally.
> Maybe this effects non-English charsets? I've used this for about 6
> months or so with no ill side effects that I can detect.
>
Funny how inconsistent these things are...I've been using the debian
mozilla packages, which have included this patch since 0.97 or so, and
they've maintained it through 1.0. Certain punctuation like apostrophes
and quotation marks are very often mangled, as well as (foreign) accented
characters. I don't know if this is a character set issue or not
(although, oddly enough, in my limited experience, Japanese has displayed
without error). Perhaps this is just a debian problem...I don't remember
if the problem existed with versions before 0.98 when it was still
officially maintained or not.
> Also, the posted patch for Mozilla broke with 0.98 IIRC, and last I
> looked he is not maintaining this any more. Shame. I have updated the
> tiny patch and have RH7 spec file + patch for Mozilla 1.0. Also, rpms
> but I am reluctant to post those due the beastly size :/
>
>
Too bad about it not being maintained...maybe the debian patch has some
problems yours doesn't. That would explain the discrepancies with the
corruption.
> Does this work for widgets and browser window? (if you know, that is).
It works for everything. I've just downloaded the last non-redhat
binaries, the rendering is very nice and it doesn't seem to have any of
the corruption I noticed with gdkxft. Unfortunately its based on an
obsolete 0.9.8-era snapshot. The latest RPMs are based on 1.0 though.
Hal Burgiss
wrote:
>>
> Too bad about it not being maintained...maybe the debian patch has some
> problems yours doesn't. That would explain the discrepancies with the
> corruption.
IIRC, the actual patch for Mozilla is really just a one liner, so I
doubt this is it. The patched file changed significantly, and the line
patched just moved. Yes, too bad he didn't stay with this. It is nice
having AA with GTK and Mozilla, even with a few minor flaws. I've
tried emailing him, but no answer. Maybe something happened...
--
Hal Burgiss
Steve Wazowski
>
> 3. Use a version of mozilla patched with native Xft support. This is
> the best solution...Mozilla uses Xft to render fonts natively, it looks
> just as good as the gdkxft version but without the display problems. You
> can get source and binary RPMs from:
>
> ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/experimental/xft/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/1.0/
>
Wow! That works really well. I was beginning to think a pretty mozilla
was not likely ;-)
Tnx.
S.