On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Freddie Witherden <fr...@wi...> wrote: > Hi all, > > As some of you probably know I am working on the GSoC project to > externalise the Mathtex engine from Matplotlib. Today I have been > toying around with the renderer using various backends. > > One of the interesting things that I discovered was that the Cairo > backend was making use of subpixel rendering. (Or 'ClearType' as > Microsoft call it.) This is not surprising -- by default Cairo will > respect a users fontconfig settings when rendering text. Since I have > subpixel rendering enabled all text rendered by Cairo is subpixel > rendered. > > While this is fantastic for on screen text -- being significantly more > pleasing to look at that the text produced by the AGG backend -- it is > unsuitable for print. Now it is not too difficult to disable this, > Cairo has an API call: cairo_font_options_set_antialias to deal with > this. > > While I could write a quick patch to always disable subpixel rendering > it would be something off a loss to those who either view their graphs > onscreen or export them for the web -- where using subpixel rendering > is now surprisingly common. > > Is it worth looking into adding subpixel rendering as a configuration > option? The matplotlib.lines.Line2D objects has an antialiased property -- we could add the same property to matplotlib.text.Text to turn on/off subpixel rendering (which could also be supported as an rc param) JDH