Fonts as sharp as razors: Crux ports for -LCD patches

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

One of the things I always find amazing when I install Arch Linux is the patches for cairo, fontconfig and libxft that are specific to LCDs. Install those packages on a laptop, adjust the X settings to your hardware and it’s like you installed a new screen. Simply beautiful stuff.

Looking to mimic the same razor-sharp edges on my Crux system, I came up with three ports and hijacked two others, all of which I’ll duplicate here, just for future reference. I don’t maintain a Crux repository, so if you’re interested, you’ll have to copy-and-paste, manually update and then compile. But you might end up doing that anyway, so it probably won’t bother you.

Another over-exuberant thank-you to Colin Zheng, whose PKGBUILD2Pkgfile script was, once again, simply invaluable in this process. Two seconds and a brief edit, and these Pkgfiles were done.

Cairo-LCD.

# Description: Cairo vector graphics library (with custom LCD filter).
# URL: http://cairographics.org/
# Maintainer: 
# Depends on: libpng xorg-libxrender fontconfig xorg-libpixman xorg-libxcb pkg-config

name=cairo-lcd
version=1.8.0
release=1
source=(http://cairographics.org/releases/cairo-$version.tar.gz lcd-filter.patch)
build () 
{ 
    cd cairo-$version;
    patch -p1 < ../lcd-filter.patch || return 1;
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-xcb --disable-static || return 1;
    make || return 1;
    make DESTDIR=$PKG install || return 1
}

LibXft-LCD. I have my CHOST variable set to i686-pc-gnu-linux or whatever, but I don’t think it’s truly necessary for this. Let me know if I’m wrong and I’ll trim those parts out.

# Description: FreeType-based font drawing library for X (with custom LCD filter)
# URL: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/
# Maintainer: 
# Depends on: fontconfig xorg-libxrender pkg-config

name=libxft-lcd
version=2.1.11
release=1
source=(http://xorg.freedesktop.org//releases/individual/lib/libXft-$version.tar.bz2 libxft_export.diff xorg-lib-libXft-lcd-filter.patch)
build () 
{ 
    cd libXft-${version};
    patch -Np0 -i ../libxft_export.diff || return 1;
    patch -Np1 -i ../xorg-lib-libXft-lcd-filter.patch || return 1;
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --build=${CHOST} --host=${CHOST};
    make || return 1;
    make DESTDIR=$PKG install || return 1
}

FontConfig-LCD.

# Description: A library for configuring and customizing font access (custom LCD filter).
# URL: http://www.fontconfig.org/release/
# Maintainer: 
# Depends on: fontconfig

name=fontconfig-lcd
version=2.6.0
release=1
source=(10-lcd-filter.conf)
build () 
{ 
    install -D -m644 10-lcd-filter.conf $PKG/etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-lcd-filter.conf || return 1
}

Note that Cairo-LCD depends on xcb-util, which in turn is dependent on gperf. Both of those I found in the mxq repository, and I’ll copy here, just in case that’s not available.

xcb-util.

# Description: number of libraries which sit on top of libxcb
# URL: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/
# Maintainer: Bartlomiej Palmowski, maks1k at wp dot pl
# Depends on: xorg-libxcb gperf

name=xcb-util
version=0.3.0
release=1
source=(http://${name/-util}.freedesktop.org/dist/$name-$version.tar.bz2)

build() {
    cd $name-$version
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-static
    make
    make DESTDIR=$PKG install
}

gperf.

# Description: perfect hash function generator
# URL: http://www.gnu.org/software/gperf/
# Packager: Mattias Hedenskog <mattias@hedenskog.se>
# Maintainer: Bartlomiej Palmowski, maks1k at wp dot pl

name=gperf
version=3.0.3
release=1
source=(ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/$name/$name-$version.tar.gz)

build() {
    cd $name-$version
    ./configure --prefix=/usr \
        --mandir=/usr/man



    make
    make DESTDIR=$PKG install
    rm -rf $PKG/usr/share
}

Thanks to the real maintainer for those.

Oh, and how do they look, you ask?

That’s probably not a very good example. And the JPG conversion loses some quality. But it should give you an idea.

P.S.: Don’t forget to download the actual patches, probably from the Arch repositories, and include them in the port directory. Otherwise, these just plain won’t work.

Edit: Here’s the LM Roman 10 at 10-point in Leafpad. The image doesn’t really look as good as what’s on my screen, and I seem to have the best luck with 9-point fonts, but this isn’t bad for a 96dpi 1600×1200 screen. In my own humble opinion, of course. 😉