Text anti-aliasing and scalable fonts with Xft on X Windows
On X Window platforms Views can optionally use Xft and FreeType for font rendering.
Features:
Allows anti-aliasing and translucency (alpha channel) when drawing text.
Scalable fonts improve the rendering of transformed text in methods
drawTransformedString(), and more specifically in the class
IlvZoomableLabel.
Enabling and using this feature requires no addition or modification to the Views API. All the user has to do is use font names as returned by the
'fc-list' command. For example, if the
'fc-list' command output contains
'Liberation Serif:style=Bold', use the font description
"%Liberation Serif-12-B" to load this font in Views.
The feature is optional. You can disable it by setting the environment variable
'ILVUSEXFT' or the resource
'UseXft' to false. By default, the feature is enabled if Xft is installed.
When the feature is enabled, Views first attempts to load fonts with Xft, based on their name or description. If this fails, Views loads the font using the Xlib; in this case, text rendered using this font does not have anti-aliasing or translucency.
Limitations:
Views does not ship Xft, so the functionality is only available when the target platform has Xft installed.
The feature can only be used in 'shared' format, i.e., when the application is linked with Views shared libraries. The functionality is disabled in 'static' format.
The feature is only available on Linux and Solaris platforms.
Published date: 05/24/2022
Last modified date: 02/24/2022