Will Mozilla for Linux eventually do font anti-aliasing? The party line from the X people is that it is impossible to implement at the X protocol level without a complete rewrite (breaking backwards compatibility in the process), and is something that has to be done by individual X clients. The problem is that no application that I know of does it. Anti-aliases fonts would make Mozilla MUCH prettier. The lack of anti-aliased fonts is the main reason that the Windows and Mac interfaces are so much cleaner looking that any Linux desktop.

I agree, but this shoud be considered an enhancement. Marking as NEW.

i think erik or someone in his group does the font rendering

Actually, people are working on TrueType and OpenType renderers for X. Maybe they will eventually support anti-aliasing. I don't know how Mozilla would hook up to those features. Marking M20 for now.

updating qa contact

Actually, Freetype ( http://www.freetype.org ) v2.0 is approaching final. This supports practically all font formats. I'm not sure where the code could hook it but it would definitely be nice to support full AA on all platforms. PFR support under Windows is absolutely beautiful, but a little slow. I'd love to think of linking to an OpenType/TrueType font and displaying it as if it were installed (better than installed) ... Secondly, I'd like to see if TrueDoc (BitStream) would be willing to take a trip on the wild side and work with Mozilla on embedding support for their font format.

Freetype 2.0.1 is out. In reading through the documentation and notes, it will also render the Truedoc PFR font format. Since Freetype is XP and freely available it shouldn't have any drawbacks ???

Since the release of XFree86 4.0.2 it has been possible to provide antialiased fonts using the XRender extension. Because XFree86 4.0.2 is an official, full release of XFree86, it probably will be included in all major Linux distributions pretty soon. It would be just great if Mozilla supported this ASAP. More info concerning the matter can be found from http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/ .

mark it as future and reassign to bstell. cc shanjian

Erik and I are very aware of Render (http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/), Xft, and OpenType support in FreeType (http://freetype.sourceforge.net/old_index.html). It would also be very nice to add Arabic/Hebrew glyph shaping/positioning.

dupe of 82076?

dup of 100570? :)

See also bug 90813 and bug 107020 where some of the groundwork seems to be done (albeit for other purposes).

This is a more general bug than bug 82076 / bug 100570 which deal with using FreeType2 to render TrueType font. Perhaps this bug should be closed? Bug 90813 deals with anti-aliasing scaled X bitmap fonts.

bug 107018, bug 107019, bug 107020, and bug 107025, are subparts (to ease review/checkin) of bug 90813

Why can't the mozilla patch from gdkxft.sourceforge.net be used? Along with the gdkxft library? Or something similar? I use a patched mozilla every day, and it just looks sweet, sweet, sweet. Eversince I found that patch, and bought the crossover plugin, I havn't had any problems online. Mozilla went from 3[10] to 10[10] as a browsing experience. /Chris

Chris: One of mozilla goals is to make the page text readable. To be readable the glyphs must be valid (not '?', boxes, or blanks). Thus mozilla must avoid using a font to display a character that the font does not have a glyph for. For non-iso10646 mozilla assumes that the fonts have glyphs for all their characters (true with a very few exceptions). However for fonts that XLDF maps as iso10646 fonts (Unicode) the fonts never have glyphs for all of Unicode. To get the glyph list moz must *load* the font and *download* the *entire* set of per-glyph metrics. This can occur in the middle of displaying a page (ie: cannot be done ahead of time and may result in *every* font to being opened if not font has the needed glyph. The time penalty is in the range of 2+ minutes. While this happens infrequently it does happen enough so that it cannot be ignored. Until there is a better solution way to get the list of glyphs (ie: a replacement/upgrade for XLFD) mapping Unicode fonts as iso10646, which is what Xft does, is not attractive.

Brian, I see your point. According to you, the XFT is not good with unicode, and would cause some considerable performance loss in Mozilla when using unicode fonts. It's very important for mozilla to be able to render all the fonts and to be able to use unicode. However, there are a lot of users who don't need unicode fonts. Couldn't the XFT stuff be included in linux mozilla and be turned on or off from the "preferences" panel. Nothing is lost (people using unicode are no worse off than before) and many other people would be very happy to have the smooth fonts in mozilla. I'm not a coder, so I don't know how hard this would be, but optional anti-aliasing which works for many people is better than no anti-aliasing for all people. -Michael

TrueType fonts are Unicode. How would you feel if a page had a funny char and moz froze for 90 seconds then ended up displaying a '?' anyway? How would you feel if you could see other apps displaying a certian character (say the trademark symbol) but moz put displayed a '?' instead? Would you file a bug? I hope so.

There are two kinds of anti-aliased fonts that are now in the moz linux client: anti-aliased scaled bitmaps (AASB), added in Nov 17, 2001, see bug 90813 see also bug 112490 TrueType fonts using FreeType2 library. There are 2 efforts for TrueType font support in the Linux/Unix client. (The reasons for 2 efforts is outside the scope of this bug.) Using moz internally developed code, see bug 116147, added Feb 19, 2002, at this date it is available to developers with FreeType2 installed adn will be available to users after the build systems have FreeType2 installed, see bug 126713 Using a 3rd party library, currently under development by blizzard@mozilla.org (blizzard: could you post the bug #) All three of these *do* support anti-aliasing on all X servers using a standard TrueColor visual, eg: 16/24/32 bit color depth. (The unfinished version has finished Xrender support, the finished version has unfinished Xrender support).

It would be nice to see 'cleartype'-type functionality included to improve the display even further for those of us w/ LCD displays. The Xft library has this; the mozilla re-implementation does not.

In response to Brian's request above, I believe blizzard's truetype implementation is bug 126919.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 126919 ***

Verified as dup.