How to make font Smooth in QT?

[janton]

Hello All,

I have a simple question, or more something i need to understand i think...

I designed a application in Photoshop and though font would look simular in qt, but it doesn't ofcourse.. after some time googling i learned photoshop uses some soort of smoothing the fonts. I found this is also possible in qt or at least i found something but it wasn't really clear to me still.

In the attachment you can see the difference. In the left image you see the Photoshop text and on the right you see the same font and size in qt
SEE HERE:
how to make text smooth in qt.png

Is it possible i make the font more smooth, so it could look simular like the Photoshop version?

[helloworld]

What platform are you targeting? I have been asking myself the same question and find this problem especially prevelant when rendering fonts in smaller sizes on MS Windows.

So I just started to create some Qt-styled wrapper classes for the FreeType library. FreeType (www.freetype.org) is a font engine capable of rendering high-quality font output. It provides a low-level C API and is already used in a number of projects, but I wanted something that works without too much effort together with Qt's Painter framework.

Currently I have something like:

QFreeTypeEngine
QFreeTypeFont
QFreeTypeGlyph

...where a QFreeTypeEngine is responsible for creating and managing QFreeTypeFont objects for a specific application, and individual QFreeTypeFonts can be created from a font in the local filesystem, or from a resource.

In attached screenshot you can see the difference between FreeType (above), and Windows' default font rendering algorithm (below).

(Actually I'm not sure it's the exact same font face in both examples, but you can still see the difference in quality, especially if you open the image in PS and zoom in and look at the anti-aliasing.)

ftype.jpg

[wysota]

So I just started to create some Qt-styled wrapper classes for the FreeType library. FreeType (www.freetype.org) is a font engine capable of rendering high-quality font output. It provides a low-level C API and is already used in a number of projects, but I wanted something that works without too much effort together with Qt's Painter framework.

I guess you are not aware Qt already uses FreeType...

I'm not really sure what you guys are doing but font rendering in Qt is done using platform means and sometimes poor quality of fonts is caused by wrong settings of libraries responsible for font management/rendering, like FreeType, FontConfig or ClearType. Fonts in Qt apps and fonts on images in Photoshop are almost bound to look different as Photoshop provides a more fine-grained control over the rendering compared to what the system offers for applications. You can write the same text in Photoshop and on your window title bar and they will also look different.