[poppler] Qt4 Arthur

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Saturday 16 May 2009 13:27:46 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> Splash uses FreeType for fonts so if freetype has subpixel rendering (i
> guess you only want subpixel rendering for fonts?) you should be able to
> get it with some small patch here and there.

I tried, and it's unfortunately not trivial.  Splash simply assumes that text 
will always be monochrome.  I was able to get subpixel rendering working, but 
at the cost of text colour and the alpha channel, so text is always black and 
looks ugly on anything except white.  Maybe with some more work it would be 
possible (a few core methods would need reworking), but I found the Splash 
code difficult to work with, so I gave up on that approach.

> > > It is, noone is going to use Qt4 frontend with Cairo, politics.
> >
> > Mmm, well in the long term it's not ideal, but there are quite a few of
> > us out there that are pragmatists.  Most people will have Cairo installed
> > for Firefox anyway.  I'm guessing it shouldn't be too hard to do, right? 
> > I'll look into it further if I have the time.

I decided to try this approach anyway, and the results are good.  So that's 
one person at least who will be using the Qt4 frontend with Cairo :)  My 
patchset is attached for people to do with as they wish.  I'm afraid I've only 
modified the CMakeFiles, so this will almost certainly break an autotools 
build.

Here is a quick comparison:
Before (Splash): http://snurl.com/if1b1
After (Cairo + Subpixel Rendering): http://snurl.com/if1c2

The lcd filtering could do with some work -- there is some nasty colour 
fringing.  For me though, this is a step in the right direction.

Paul
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0001-Basic-Cairo-backend-work-completed.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 5325 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/attachments/20090520/b19d3ff9/attachment.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0002-Cairo-output-can-now-be-built-for-Qt4-without-buildi.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 837 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/attachments/20090520/b19d3ff9/attachment-0001.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0003-Setting-default-QT4-backend-to-Cairo.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 756 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/attachments/20090520/b19d3ff9/attachment-0002.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0004-Forcing-subpixel-rendering-in-Cairo-backend.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 1278 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/attachments/20090520/b19d3ff9/attachment-0003.bin