[reportlab-users] blurry (dithered) lines + font height, descent etc.

[Robin Becker]

In article <005801c27f4b$d582f780$0300a8c0@mike1>, Michael Steuer
<mike@awakened-lands.com> writes

The only non-trivial docs I know of are at 

        http://www.gnome.org/~mathieu/libart/libart.html

>Do you guys have any documentation on Libart? If yes, could you maybe send it to
>me, or point me to a web page?
>
>I had a look on the Libart homepage (http://www.levien.com/libart/) and followed
>the link to the gnome project from there
>(http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/canvas/canvas.html). It seems that
>GNOME is using libart without anti-aliasing, considering the output examples on
>that page.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Mike.

As for the canvas it seems to be a different thing to libart I see
"Also, items are asked to draw themselves onto a temporary buffer (a GDK
pixmap in the case of the Xlib renderer, or an RGB buffer in the case of
the Libart renderer)" at the bottom of page 2.

By all means check the sources of libart to see if there's an obvious
way to turn off antialiasing. I certainly didn't see one.

Before we did the libart version (which has its problems) we used
another library called GD which I had to patch backwards to restore the
GIF functionality which the author was no longer willing to maintain.

The good thing about GD was that it was simple enough for me to
understand fairly completely, the bad thing was that it didn't do anti-
aliasing or path filling and it had only simple fonts unless we used
freetype which is huge enough to worry me.

We're not going to get xlib to work well with win32 so it's unlikely
that I'll be going that route (I did once fix up most of xlib so we
could get a nice Tk+BLT under win32).

Right now libart is used by both Gnome and internally by Mozilla so it
is at least used by many. I know there are bugs and there's only one
Raph Levien.
-- 
Robin Becker