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Re: Turning off antialiasing


From: Anselm Helbig
Subject: Re: Turning off antialiasing
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:41:44 +0200

At Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:18:23 +0200,
Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> I just upgraded to Emacs 23.1. Good work! I have not explored everything
> yet, but I am already impressed. I like the little details, like that
> isearch now displays which characters make the search fail. And with the
> new internal coding system, I finally have combining diacritics. Yay!
> (As soon as I find a font with the right glyphs I can finally write
> so-called "umlauts" as they were intended, when I cite from German
> baroque literature. I have been waiting for that for a long time!) Also,
> Emacs' new appearance is nice and shiny. I find the new default font a
> good choice, although I am not sure that I personally like it. But it
> certainly gives Emacs a modern appearance.
> 
> Of course, upgrading broke a couple of things in my .emacs, as is to be
> expected from a major upgrade. I'll fix it all, eventually. One thing,
> though, is rather urgent for me:
> 
> Antialiasing, while looking pretty, lets the characters seem slightly
> blurred, which, after a while, starts to hurt my eyes and gives me a
> headache.
> 
> Is there a way to turn antialiasing off, preferably without changing the
> font backend? If not, will there be one in the future? Ideally, I'd like
> to turn it off on a per-face basis; antialisasing is painful for me only
> with the default face, since it's this face in which I read large chunks
> of text on the screen.
> 
> Unless I overlooked something, I suppose the only way right now to deal
> with it, is to use X ressources to prohibit Emacs from using xft,
> thereby turning off antialiasing entirely. Is that right? Or is there at
> least a way to keep using xft and turn antialiasing off from Lisp, which
> I'd prefer?

It's easy, just choose a bitmapped font. Something like

  Emacs.font: fixed

in your .Xresources should do it. Terminus is another popular choice
for a monospaced bitmapped font, and there are lots of others out
there. Using a bitmapped font also results in faster display
operations. 

That being said, you could also play with your display settings:
enable sub-pixel rendering and cranking up your font hinting results
in less blurry fonts. On my ubuntu box, gnome-appearance-properties
has a font tab where you can change these settings. You still might
prefer a non-antialiased bitmapped font, but that's a personal matter.

HTH, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com


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