Danns.co.ukDavid Turner's Patches
When looking into font rendering in Linux, I couldn't understand why the subpixel rendering was so bad. It felt as though I was the only person in the world that noticed the horrific colour fringes around the letters on my LCD screen, as I found very few comments about it online:
Subpixel-Rendered Text
A Closer Look
Now to me at least, those colour fringes are very noticeable, especially on the vertical strokes. Fortunately, it seems as though David Turner, one of the authors of FreeType, is also aware of this problem. It's not a FreeType problem per se, as FreeType just renders the fonts. Cairo (in GNOME & Firefox), and LibXFT (in KDE) are responsible for displaying the text onscreen. To this end, Mr Turner created a set of patches for FreeType, LibXFT, and Cairo, that improves the problem no end. See for yourself:
With David Turner's Patches
A Closer Look
I find it interesting that up close, the patches seem to produce heavier colour fringing. The text appears bolder, too. Maybe there's some other factor that I accidentally affected between screenshots. Anyway, it's clear from the closeup that the subpixel rendering is still there, but it's barely noticeable on the screen. Notice as well that the fringes are different colours on the different vertical strokes. This is down to subpixel positioning — the glyphs are no longer pixel-aligned as they were before. The whole text is rendered at the sub-pixel level. Well done David :)
And here are the obligatory links:
