[Fontconfig] Greatly improved subpixel filtering in Xft
Anders Kaseorg
anders at kaseorg.com
Thu May 6 06:56:32 EST 2004
The current subpixel filtering in Xft is nearly useless, as black text
tends to come out as a distracting mixture of red and blue:
<http://www.kaseorg.com/~anders/subpixel-before.png>
That's because the filter is currently limited to staying within pixel
boundaries. I wrote this patch to fix it:
<http://www.kaseorg.com/~anders/libXft-improved-filtering.patch>
The result:
<http://www.kaseorg.com/~anders/subpixel-after.png>
This is a *huge* improvement--even without proper gamma correction, I
see almost no color fringing at all. It works for RGB, BGR, VRGB, and
VBGR. The only side effect I've noticed is that the underlines for
access keys in some GTK menus become a tiny bit wider (which is probably
GTK's fault, since the menus in Mozilla applications are fine).
It currently uses a simple box filter, [1,1,1]/3, because that looked
sharper to me than things like [1,3,4,3,1]/12, but the filter is trivial
to change, and it can go outside the current pixel by arbitrary amounts.
Anders
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