Advanced antialiasing control & font hinting

[Bug Importer]

Please add an option to deactivate antialias in drawings. And option to select different types of antialiasing.

[Peter Moulder (pjrm)]

A corresponding directive in SVG is
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/painting.html#ShapeRenderingProperty
and following.

[Bug Importer (bug-importer)]

True. It is really necessary.

I often work with large and complex images, with lots of
elements (think on, but not only, autotraced SVGs), and they
can take quite some time to render. If antialiasing was
deactivated, this would be much more fast.

[Bug Importer (bug-importer)]

Also, aliased text is commonly used in web design.
Especially when you're showing the customer how the page
will look on their (crappy) IE, because most windows don't
have cleartype on by default.

Besides that, mimimal pizel fonts are very common in
webdesign and they look very big and blurry when
antialiased, their nature is not to be antialiased.

There is a very good application (XaraX) for windows and one
of the most requested features is aliased text.

This is a very important feature to implement.

Thanks!
Metin Amiroff <amiroff at gmail dot com>

[Buliabyak-users (buliabyak-users)]

For text, this one is applicable:

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/painting.html#TextRenderingProperty

However it does not contain a requirement to unconditionally
disable AA or enable hinting. Inkscape now behaves as with
geometricPrecision. Setting optimizeSpeed MAY disable AA,
and setting optimizeLegibility MAY enable hinting, but this
is not required.

Which does not mean we should not do it, of course. An
option to set optimizeSpeed interpreting it as non-AA, and
optimizeLegibility interpreting it as reenabling hinting
(now disabled) would be useful.

Alexandre Prokoudine also suggested optionally using the BCI
hinter in freetype, which would also fall under this RFE.
This would only have an effect if hinting is reenabled.

[agb (agb-ukr)]

And what about different types of antialiasing?
cleartype for example...

It is really needed!!
Banners for web looks ugly... (duplicate) Look, please, here:

http://lecom-ltd.com/dwl/ooo.gif - OpenOffice: Tahoma, 12pt, Scale 100%, Screenshot
http://lecom-ltd.com/dwl/ink.gif - Inkscape 45.1: Tahoma, 10pt, Export to PNG on 90dpi, Screenshot

[agb (agb-ukr)]

I think this is not WISHLIST!
This function is very needed for webdesign.
Any opinions?

[Tom Davidson (tjd-mit)]

There is an option to disable antialiasing in Inkscape... it's just not working right now. See bug 168346.

I'll update the summary to reflect that this report is now a feature request for more advanced antialiasing and hinting.

[birdsaregood (ariel36)]

Yes, please add support for font hinting and selective disabling of anti-aliasing for bitmap exporting. It is necessary for web design/small bitmaps/small graphics/icons.

[Chris McCormick (chris-mccormick)]

This feature would be great on a per-text element basis. What would be fantastic is a 'do not anit-alias' checkbox which, when selected forces points where lines in the fonts meet to snap to pixel or grid. E.g. lines within the path of the font are quantized to grid/pixel boundaries.

[ivan louette (ivan-louette)]

Attached is a filter which does the job for lines, shapes and text.

It's optimized for 1 pixel wide lines but you can make it more crispy if you want : simply change the last Color matrix value from -500 to -800 or more (but then some discontinuities will occur in 1 pixel lines).

[Chris McCormick (chris-mccormick)]

Ivan, this is amazing, thank you!

[ivan louette (ivan-louette)]

Thanks !

The problem remaining is that this filter multiplies alpha channel and thus it's not suitable for semi-transparent objects.

[Paulio (bleedindeadly)]

I agree this isn't just Wishlist. I'm using logos that get absolutely destroyed at small sizes without font hinting. Unfortunately I have to abandon using Inkscape now because it's not up to the job.

[grey tomorrow (gtomorrow)]

Closing because INVALID: scope of original bug report has changed over time.

If you feel this issue has been unjustly closed, please feel free to open a new issue at https://inkscape.org/report . Thank you.

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/greytomorrow