Tim: >> Just to be picky, that's not necessarily the case. LCDs can show fonts >> quite nicely without it. But if you're using a system that draws fonts >> in an ugly manner without it (e.g. FC3, FC4, haven't tested FC5), yes >> it's the case. It seems to be the design of the fonts used by Fedora, >> as well as the font rendering system. Other things can draw very neat >> looking fonts that only occupy one pixel width. Marcelo Magno T. Sales: > Yes, some systems display fonts better than others without sub-pixel > rendering. > However, I'm yet to see a system, Linux or not, in which text will not look > nicer on LCDs after setting up sub-pixel rendering. When it's well > configured, the difference is huge, specially on small fonts. I've experienced the opposite. It looks good for big fonts, but helps very little for small fonts. I've seen fonts which render one pixel to one pixel on an LCD screen, and they're neat to read. Small, and neat. No antialiasing. Contrariwise, I've seen small fonts are a complete mess on LCDs, where the font drawing pixels don't sit on the LCD display pixels, glitching about. The blurring involved with antialiasing just made them more of a fuzzy mess. It didn't help any in that case, and makes everything look soft and fuzzy all the time, anyway. Even without that dancing about, it still didn't help draw them better. It's an attempt to make things look better on a low resolution display device that doesn't always work. Thus far, I compare it to the differences you see on old dot-matrix printers, where you had nice simple fonts that were made from an 8x8 grid, that were quite legible, compared against attempts to show complex tiny fonts where there weren't really enough dots per inch to do so. It's a stop gap measure until LCD display resolutions get up to the point that CRTs have had for quite some time. -- (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
