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Text Anti-Aliasing - How to disable?
Posted by bobdewhirst
on 2007-01-24 15:47
Hi there,
Trying out Komodo for the first time and like what I see so far. However, I can't find how to turn of anti-aliasing in the editor, a must for any serious editor, I'm sure you'll agree.
Anyone found how to do this?
Thanks!
Bob.
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Actually, you're maybe the first (or the first in a long time) that I've heard of that has requested this. Komodo does not have any user setting that controls this, instead we pick up on the settings of your OS. For example, on Windows XP if you turn off font smoothing, Komdo will follow suit.
--
JeffG | Komodo IDE 4.0 | MacBook Pro OS X Intel / Ubuntu 6.06 i386
Can you add it as a feature request? I'd love to use Komodo but I can't work with small anti-aliased fonts all day. My main editors (BBEdit and Xcode) are both set to use Monaco at 10px, and both don't a-a the font at that size, but for some reason Komodo does.
yeah, for OS X, you don't get the option to turn off font-smoothing altogether. you can disable it for any fonts below a certain font size, but using that then means that you end up having to use a really small font in the editor, or having less than optimal font performance for all small fonts on the system. it'd be very nice to have more fine-grained control over it.
Yeah, I've been obsessing over this, myself. I keep downloading Komodo with hopes that this would be enabled, and then I try to use it, but I just can't. I'm on OS X, BTW. Zend, BBEdit, and Eclipse all work as expected.
Thanks in advance,
It's a real bummer, if you ask me!
If anyone has some suggestions for how to enable/disable anti-aliasing, or wants to get involved to help this move forward, please let us know. I'd be willing to help out, but at present I have no idea of how anti-aliasing is being handled on the Mac (especially relating to the Mozilla/Firefox architecture Komodo is using).
Cheers,
Todd
Does this help?
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3183453&sid=9b0fa4f9178bfa...
From the comments on:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112506
Seems like Mozilla don't want to support this through the application, but want to leave it to the OS to control. From what it seems though, Firefox may still be ignoring the system preference on the Mac...
For Windows users, there is the following cleartype application controller:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx
My point was that it seems from the post I pasted that you can compile the engine without aliasing on, then you could compile komodo against that.
The problem on the mac is that most of time you want aliasing ON, except when you're coding.
Safari has a setting to turn off text aa, and based on that link, it seems possible in mozilla as well.
The most promising thing I get with that thread is this:
...and later:
But what this really means is:
Obviously we're not going to release builds that disable Font AA in all cases; our preferred approach would be an about:config option, as the poster suggests, so that users who really really want to turn AA off can.
--
JeffG
And I suppose it'd be too much maintenance to link against a different build for one platform, right? ;)
I'll see if I can take a look into it on a weekend. Any links to relevant docs for hacking komodo would be appreciated.
The best approach for this would be through the OpenKomodo project:
http://www.openkomodo.com/
You can download the latest svn code and compile it:
http://svn.openkomodo.com/openkomodo/view/openkomodo/trunk/README.txt
After building, the "openkomodo/mozilla/build/xxx/mozilla" directory will contain all the related mozilla code and binaries, that is where you'd need to do your tweaking for the AA stuff, and then after compiling those changes into the mozilla libraries. Running Komodo will automatically link/inherit these changes.
Cheers,
Todd
I make the changes in the mozilla codebase, then run build.py mozilla, then bk build, correct?
You'd probably be best to run the "build.py" script in order to build Mozilla first (without any changes), just to be sure this step works and that you end up with a runnable openkomodo application. Then once you have that up and running you can modify the mozilla source code and then recompile with your changes by the following steps:
Cheers,
Todd
I've already built and verified the distro works; I was just having trouble linking my changes into Komodo. Do I need to rebuild Komodo after I compile my changes in mozilla?
No. The mozilla parts are dynamically linked to the Komodo executable through library files (.dylib on the mac). So updating (rebuilding) the mozilla libraries will be enough and the next time Komodo is run it'll take into account the changes you've made.
"And I suppose it'd be too much maintenance to link against a different build for one platform, right? ;)"
I'm not sure I understand that; are you saying you think we should turn off Anti-aliased text in all of our Mac builds, with no way to turn it on if the user prefers that? That is unlikely.
I understand that you prefer un-aliased text for programming, and I support the idea of giving you a choice to set that assuming it doesn't involve a lot of yak-shaving. I'd like to see if people can do builds of the Open Komodo tree with these options. I''d really like to see this as an option, somewhere in Preferences / Fonts and Colours. I can't see why we would impose that on all Mac users though.
--
JeffG
Is the use of a-a fonts an issue for the entire UI in Komodo, or just the editor part, or both?
The editor is Scintilla and would be unaffected by any changes to Mozilla. You would need to patch scintilla to get non a-a fonts. The code is commented out, see contrib/scintilla/macosx/PlatMacOSX.cxx line 96.
Oh, thank you. That just saved me a world of trouble.