Since I wrote my original article on the subject of font rendering in Linux, a few things have happened: Freetype development has moved forward, and I’ve experimented quite a bit, always trying to improve on how fonts appear on screen. I’ve achieved significantly better results using the latest Freetype and Cairo LCD patches than was previously possible, and have finally spent a morning putting my experience in writing to help others with similar interests.
I’ve been laying low these past few weeks with good reason: more layoffs at work, and greater pressure from head office to deliver the finished product (including a drop-dead date I’m pretty sure we’ll miss). I’ve still got plenty to do, but all the critical-path items are up to the developers.
One of my longest-running annoyances with font rendering under Linux has been that of the Georgia font; it is a modern favourite for rendering serif text as its bolder weight and well-designed hinting. Unfortunately, Georgia has never rendered as well for me under Linux as it did in Windows; I finally put 2 and 2 together and realised why this is the case, and came up with a simple solution to fix my complaint.
Important Note: This article is deprecated; in a more recent article I have briefly explained how to achieve better results than those below. Since this is a blog, I’ve left the original article intact for historical reasons.
As a designer and as someone who spends a lot of their time in front of a screen, I’m especially sensitive to how fonts render in the software I use. One of the greatest challenges I’ve had with Linux is getting text to render simultaneously attractively and readably. The good news is, after a lot of tinkering, I think I’ve got it more or less down pat. What follows are some basic instructions as to what I did, although I suggest reading and altering to suit your needs as opposed to outright copying so as to ensure the results you seek.First, a brief definition of what I sought: Antialiased fonts are relatively easy to achieve on Linux in recent times thanks to considerable effort by its advocates. The trick for me was to strike a balance between the smooth, sleek look of Mac OSX’s “antialias the hell out of everything” approach and Microsoft’s cleartype, which produces (in my opinion) clearer and more legible text at frequently-used font sizes (at my screen’s resolution, anyway) but less appealing font shapes at higher resolutions, and fonts get obliterated at lower resolutions.If you’re interested in improving font rendering in Linux and seeing some examples, read on.
Over the past few days I’ve finally found time to familiarise myself with Scribus, the open source desktop publishing tool for Linux, Macintosh and Windows. I decided to learn as I always do—through the practical experience of an actual project.
For my task, I wanted to try to create an attractive, electronic reproduction of Iain Banks’ novel The Crow Road with the original black and white cover art by Peter Brown. This type of publication is typical of desktop publishing packages and would involve no high-resolution bitmaps as everything would be accomplished through the use of vector graphics.
Scribus turned out to be easy to acquire and install on both Windows and Linux; the latter was installed via Gentoo’s portage system and compiled fine with my 64-bit toolchain.
I let this one slip through the cracks even though it happened a few weeks ago: The newly redesigned Critter Jungle website was quietly launched in November. Critter Jungle, if you don’t already know, is a lovely privately-owned pet shop in Hampton Park Plaza in Ottawa (near where Carling meets the Queensway); The proprietors are family friends, so this was a one-off project in my spare time.
The main goals of the redesign were to change the appearance of the site to bring it in line with more current design trends such as elastic page width and easy-to-read content, less garish choice of colour (now that web-safe colour is effective unnecessary since everyone out there is using true-colour display modes), and to emphasize a change in direction for site content. We also wanted to make the site easier for the customer to manage, and increase accessibility and usability.
I’ve been searching around today (in vain so far) for an open-source, command-line tool that allows for the conversion of an SVG-formatted file to PDF—I know of ImageMagick which would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it rasterises the damn SVG before converting to a PDF (which defeats the purpose of creating a PDF at all in my opinion).
In my travels, however, I stumbled across Xara Corporation’s press release page (looking at something to do with Über-Converter, which would probably do the trick if I were willing to spend 12 hours getting all the Perl dependencies installed required to get the damn thing running), when I stumbled across the latest entry which was amazingly dated today (how lucky is that?):
It’s finally the weekend and none too soon: My week hasn’t been especially bad (but not especially good either. Kind of so-so) but today could have gone better—Squeaker wanted to be entertained at 4 in the morning, I had a fun visit at the bank with my financial advisor (I think I’ve decided I prefer going to the dentist), and I’m dog-tired well before my usual bedtime.
I’ve been slaving away this week at lots of Python code, too—it’s the worst kind, to boot; I’m refactoring my own old code, which is a thankless job if ever there were one (although I am adding a number of extra little switches and things for efficiency, better error handling, output verification, etc.). When you’re already pressed for time on a product release schedule, trying to explain to your manager that you’re trying to leave maintainable code that could mean literally hours of saved time per week from those that employ it regularly is pretty awkward when he knows the old version worked (no matter how old and busted you think it is).
Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd. (the creators of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution) posted on his blog today that he feels that skin-deep beauty is what Ubuntu desperately needs right now (before rambling on about something a little less to-the-point—maybe it sounds better when you hear it in from him in person).
The final release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is now available as a “free download” from Microsoft’s site as of tonight.
As a web designer who is (dramatically) impacted by this release I am of two minds. Disclosure: I am a Firefox user and have been for years, now—but as any UI designer knows, your preference has nothing to do with what you do all day long.