Re: Antialiased fonts patch.

[Evgeny Kolesnikov <evgenyz@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 2010-02-11 at 14:30 +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> On 26 January 2010 11:04, Evgeny Kolesnikov <evgenyz@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I use 8-bit in order to give GRUB ability to look and feel exactly
> > as other parts of OS, so yes, 8 bits are required. If one can't allow
> 
> Grub will never look and feel exactly as the OS unless you import
> GTK/QT, its themes, freetype, ...

GTK and QT uses FT for rendering fonts. Actually almost everything in
linux desktop uses FT.

grub-mkfont also uses FT to render common fonts formats into the PF2(3)
format.

So, GRUB2 will look and feel _exactly_ like GTK/QT in terms of
_font_rendering_. Controls and other theming is out of scope of this
patch and entire GRUB2 I suppose. Anyway - everything in QT/GTK is the
bitmaps, drawn in some order. GRUB2 understands alpha channels in
bitmaps, so everything is in the hands of GRUB2 theme designer.

> > this for his system - he can use 1-bit fonts. I don't really care about
> > such situation just because other parts of desktop on such a system will
> > be awful too.
> 
> In fact I think that 4bit antialiasing should suffice. 16 tones of the
> same color should be more than enough for most cases. Still I am not
> sure that it will make the rendering really faster than 8bit AA.
> 
> Only testing on various  real hardware can possibly answer the
> question if and when one of the methods is faster. I would even expect
> that none is overall faster and that system exist where either is.

If we really care about speed we should use 1-bit fonts. Nothing can be
faster. And 1-bit fonts will stay here.

But if we care about eye-candy view, we should not throw away any bits
from FT library result. This will not be fast enough to replace 1-bit
fonts, and it will differ from other desktop apps. So, what the profit?

You also may concern about font size itsef (15-30 Mb for sub-pixel AA),
but who really care about it when 1 Tb HDD costs less than 100$? Also we
can gzip entire font file later if it will really be the problem.