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Font anti-aliasing in Tk applications

I wanna tell you about font anti-aliasing in Tk applications, for example in Python IDLE

look, aliased fonts view, it is harmful for your eyes!

Ok, to solve this problem, i talk to your a little info about why it so :

Tk didn’t supported anti-aliasing before 8.5 version of Tk, for  more information

Font rendering: Now uses anti-aliased text under X11, and a more modern text engine (ATSUI) on Mac OS X.

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html

First, must be installed all the necessary packages, then Tk compiled with Xft support.

1.Download Xft sources

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/lib/libXft-2.3.0.tar.bz2

unpack, configure by default

you, may be see something like this

checking if gcc -std=gnu99 supports -Werror… yes
checking if gcc -std=gnu99 supports -Werror=attributes… yes
Package xorg-macros was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xorg-macros.pc’
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package ‘xorg-macros’ found
checking for XRENDER… yes
checking for FREETYPE… yes
checking for FONTCONFIG… configure: error: Package requirements (fontconfig >= 2.5.92) were not met:

No package ‘fontconfig’ found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables FONTCONFIG_CFLAGS
and FONTCONFIG_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

Install fontconfig(fontconfig, fontconfig-dev), xrender (libxrender, xrender-dev), freetype(freetype, freetype-dev), etc ..

After installing all the necessary packages you will see something like this

checking for XRENDER… yes
checking for FREETYPE… yes
checking for FONTCONFIG… yes
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating xft.pc
config.status: creating src/Makefile
config.status: creating man/Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: creating include/X11/Xft/Xft.h
config.status: include/X11/Xft/Xft.h is unchanged
config.status: executing depfiles commands
config.status: executing libtool commands

then make and make install

by default it will be installed in    /usr/local/lib, not in /usr/local/X11R6/lib

ice@ice:~> ls /usr/X11R6/lib/
fglrx          libfglrx_dm.so    libfglrx_dm.so.1.0  libGL.so.1    modules
libfglrx_dm.a  libfglrx_dm.so.1  libGL.so            libGL.so.1.2
ice@ice:~>

ice@ice:~> ls /usr/local/lib
libpython3.2m.a  libtkstub8.5.a  libXft.so.2      python2.6   tcl8.5
libtcl8.5.so     libXft.a        libXft.so.2.3.0  python3.2   tclConfig.sh
libtclstub8.5.a  libXft.la       perl5            python.png  tk8.5
libtk8.5.so      libXft.so       pkgconfig        tcl8        tkConfig.sh
ice@ice:~>

then unpack Tk, and configure with option –enable-xft2

ice@ice:~/python/tk8.5.11/unix> ./configure –enable-xft2
checking for Tcl configuration… found /home/ice/python/tcl8.5.11/unix/tclConfig.sh
checking for existence of /home/ice/python/tcl8.5.11/unix/tclConfig.sh… loading
checking for tclsh… /usr/local/bin/tclsh8.5
checking for tclsh in Tcl build directory… /home/ice/python/tcl8.5.11/unix/tclsh
- – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -  - – -

make && make install

after all that, start Python IDLE and enjoy from different view, anti-aliasing is enabled!