[Lilux-help] Re: OpenOffice

[Patrick Kaell]

Patrick Useldinger wrote:

> I did a little test at work. To my surprise, all the collegues I asked 
> for their opinion preferred the AA version. I really don't understand, I 
> have been working on computers for 25 years now, and I never found 
> someone who said that he preferred a more fuzzy picture over a sharp 
> one. Only my girlfriend prefers the non-AA fonts. Maybe that's why she's 
> with me ;-)

I have experienced similar things. I immediately see if a LCD screen 
doesn't use its real resolution. But I have seen other people at work 
who do not even see a difference. I say that the picture is miserable if 
the LCD screen has to interpolate pixels, but they do see nothing.

> One thing that's more important to me than WYSIWYG is my eyesight. The 
> fonts, as I experienced them im OOo, are causing a lot of strain to my 
> eyes and I refuse to work more that 5 minutes in such an environment.

Now, I think that you only have a problem when you use small fonts where 
a character only consists of a few pixels. By using large characters 
where every line consists of at least 4 pixels AA schould be no problem. 
You can magnify the text under OO. Or buy a higher resolution monitor 
(1280x1024 is fine ;-). The characters have been very small on your 
screenshot.

Under MacOS X, there is a setting where you can say that the OS should 
not use AA when the characters are smaller than x points.

I have to admit that I do not use much AA myself. My Mozilla doesn't use 
AA, nor my Window Manager, my wterm, my editor and so on. But with 
applications which show you the text on screen as it is printed 
afterwards like Acrobat Reader, OO, xvdi, AA is not bad.

I mainly do not use AA where it is not needed, because I do want the 
fastest desktop possible on my K6-2 500Mhz ;-) Therefore I do not use 
KDE either ;-)

> This does not mean that I do not want AA. It means that something has to 
> be improved, either
> 1- the fonts I use
> 2- the AA that's running here
> 3- maybe some piece of hardware (monitor, graphics card).

Perhaps there are only 2 solutions:

- Wait until the tireless opensource developers have improved AA
- Use MacOS X if you want a Unix system with good font support

Font support on Linux has much improved on Linux the last few years. 
Unfortunately, AA is not very efficient on the X protocol. So, if you 
use X over the network, even if you have something faster than a 
K6...... no fun

Greetings, Patrick Kaell