[cairo] Discussion: LCD Filtering API

[Brandon Wright]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 4:02 AM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
> This is not really what we're talking about here.  The rasterization may
> happen in cairo, but you still need a font backend.  Be it fontconfig, Quartz
> font, or win32 font.  Nothing changing there.
>
> behdad

Just a heads-up: Quartz and win32 both have sub-pixel filtering quirks
that are going to be difficult to imitate. Quartz has three LCD
filters selectable by the user in OSX's font dialog, which can
probably be handled by checking the setting and tweaking the FIR
filters. But Win32's "cleartype" uses sub-pixel filtering on
triple-width rasterizations with no antialiasing, which would need a
separate code-path to duplicate. While the FreeType/fontconfig backend
will definitely work well with your plan, you'll need extra code to
get native-looking results on closed platforms without the native
rasterizer.