Make subpixel smoothing default?

Adam Jackson ajax at redhat.com
Tue Oct 21 15:38:43 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 10:38 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:

> It depends a lot on your monitor. If you've got relatively large pixels, the
> colored fringes can be very visible and distracting. If you've got a
> high-PPI monitor, it can look quite good -- but then, of course, you need
> it less.
> 
> I also find that it looks much worse for light text on black background
> (i.e. old-school terminal windows) than for dark text on light (the typical
> modern default terminals and most modern web sites).
>
> But here's my concern with making it the default: if you get the subpixel
> layout wrong, it looks very very bad. What percentage of monitors are RGB
> instead of BGR? (Might it be possible for HAL (or something) to tell the
> desktop enviroment this?) What about tablets? -- if you rotate the screen
> 90°, your text is definitely horribly wrong in one of the orientations.

Monitors are overwhelmingly RGB left to right.  EDID has an extension
for telling you about this, but it's typically not provided, so for the
most part we just guess RGB and tend to be right.

In RANDR 1.2 pixel layout is available as a per-output property, so in
principle you can get this right on every piece of glass.  If you have
one rotated and one normal though, there's no getting it right, short of
fixing gtk to re-render glyphs where the window straddles or crosses
screen boundaries, or just falling back to grayscale AA for everything.

- ajax
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