Mounira and I are expecting a baby for March. It's a girl and we're very happy. On the other hand, all of our time is now dedicated to preparing everything for its coming, which includes moving about everything in our two-room appartment, and getting rid of anything we find "superflous", like my computer books, my large desk, my tower computer, my 18" LCD screen (aaargh), lots of furniture, etc...
I didn't restrained myself, which is probably why I did catch a very serious cold. I now need to stay home for a few days according to the doctor.. which, on the other hand, gives me an opportunity to write this diary entry :-)
FreeType
I've also performed a bit of coding, and just put FreeType 2.1.4-RC1 on SourceForge. It includes some significant improvements to both the automatic and Postscript hinters, thanks to David Chester and others. I advise you to install and test it on your system, you'll probably appreciate the improvements :-)
Fonts
I had not the pleasure to see the Bitstream Vera fonts yet, except the official screenshot. I wonder however in which format they'll be distributed, since this hasn't been announced publicly.
MacOS X
I've been playing with MacOS X and Jaguar on my brother's computer who uses it to make movies. My first impression are that everything seems a lot more polished than MacOS 9 (which I haven't used in a long time, I admit). Meanwhile:
-
OpenGL doing all the transparent blitting is cool, since you can seamlessly translate windows on the desktop. on the other hand, operations like resizing, which involves recomputing the whole window content are significantly slow (even GTK2 with double buffering seemed faster on my old 233 MHz laptop)
- Any kind of serifed font seems fuzzy. The sans-serif
ones are nice however, as long as you don't choose a
character size that is "too small" (< 13 pt). My brother's
computer is connect to two screens: one high-end 19", and a low-grade 15". The fonts look completely fucked up in the "small" screen, and are very hard to read. This is just to point how important screen quality is when judging the aesthetics of anti-aliased text (monochrome doesn't have this problem). And yes, we tried to adjust gamma.
- Microsoft Word is very problematic when it comes to fonts: if forces TrueType hinting on all the fonts it uses, while preserving anti-aliasing even at small character sizes. The result is pretty poor quality, as well as inconsistent rendering when compared to other applications (the same font can have a very different aspect when hinting is enabled). Fortunately, this means that TrueType hinting is mostly becoming irrelevant for high-quality display (moreover, you can still embed bitmaps when you really need them). Unfortunately, I do not remember which version it was, maybe the "problem" has been fixed in more recent ones. Or maybe there is an option to disable this optimisation (though I'd doubt it).
Thanks
Finally, a big thank you to the person who answered my problem with the NVidia logo appearing each time I started the X11 Server on my laptop. I'm sorry for not remembering your name, and I don't know how to search back the logs on Advogato.
Meanwhile, I've played with all the options described in the insanely huge README. The hardware-accelerated support for the Render extension seems cools but I didn't notice a big difference in terms of application responsiveness (I suspect this is due to X11's brean-dead three-tiered design regarding window management), and it also seems to routinely hang the server (and hence the machine since I have no means to access it from an external terminal).