[TxMt] Font anti-aliasing

[Allan Odgaard]

On 17/11/2005, at 10.53, Andreas Wahlin wrote:

> I'd hazard a guess that TextMate is a cocoa app, whereas xcode is  
> carbon. Thus textmate'sway is actually the "prefered" way.

In this instance, it's sort of the other way around.

Both TextMate and Xcode are Cocoa applications, but TextMate uses the  
ATSUI API to render text, where Xcode uses NSLayoutManager and friends.

These two systems arrive at different font metrics for the same text,  
and have different features. I initially chose ATSUI because it can  
generate bold and italic for fonts where no explicit type face exists  
(sadly, ATSUI seems to not find the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono bold/ 
italic type faces, unless when doing some strange things to the font  
file) -- there are also other reasons for going with ATSUI, but  
NSLayoutManager starts to look as the more attractive choice (and is  
the only API which have been repeatedly updated throughout OS X) --  
the NSLayoutManager though is still far to complex for my taste,  
especially if decent text rendering speeds are to be obtained.