Labview Font Rendering

[anshuljain]

Hi all,

A question regarding font rendering on Labview. It seems like Labview uses the WINE project to render the LV environment under Linux. With subpixel hinting enabled + Microsoft's  Core fonts it looks acceptably well, but doesn't give perfect rendering which resembles the Linux DE environment. I've attached a screenshot of the LV environment vs my GNOME desktop with font rendered perfectly. Is this taken care of in Labview 2009?

-Anshul

[rolfk]

Maybe this has changed in recent LabVIEW versions, but originally LabVIEW did not use any intermediate library at all, be it Gnome, KDE or any other WM. It went directly to X Windows and to be honest I would be highly surprised if they went the WINE route. This would be quite a roundabout way considering that it was in the past completely X Windows only.

Of course doing its own font handling on X Windows level might certainly have suboptimal results, considering the amount of work that went into this area alone in Gnome and KDE over all the years.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[anshuljain]

Rolf,

For some reason I thought that NI uses WINE to render LV for Linux. The look and feel (fonts, default environment) for LV is very similar to Picasa which too uses WINE. Is there a way to render it natively on Linux? Maybe linking it to the Qt or GTK+ toolkits in some manner would greatly enhance the overall experience of LV on Linux. With subpixel hinting for fonts enabled under Linux, it looks better than Windows...and if compositing (compiz, kwin) enabled...it would be simply great. IMHO, this is one drawback the Linux version of LV has as compared to the Windows one.

Anshul

[sportscliche]

Could someone please explain where LV looks for its fonts in Linux?  I built a stand-alone application that renders OK on Ubuntu/Xubuntu but is barely readable on Fedora, Mint, and Knoppix with the run-time engine installed.  I have tried adding (Helvetica) fonts to the X11 directory (primarily experimenting with Knoppix) but LV doesn't see them.

thanks,

Mike

[AdamKemp]

LabVIEW just asks X Windows for the list of fonts. Specificallty we call XListFonts. If that can't see your font then LabVIEW can't use it.