How to get better anti-aliasing results in Cairo (examples shown)

Question

Building a project using Cairo for graphics processing. Neither of the anti-aliasing options produce a good enough result. I'm using an ARGB32 surface and writing to png.

I have tried using all of the hinting styles but I can see no change in the result.

The best option for text on both white and black will be option 4 but as you can see, it's still not as nice as an output produced from the imagemagick library in example 5.

Any input or suggestions welcome.

1. Using 'ANTIALIAS_DEFAULT'

2. Using 'ANTIALIAS_NONE'

3. Using 'ANTIALIAS_GRAY'

4. Using 'ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL'

5. Using Imagemagick and it's default anti-aliasing

Answer 1

If you are stuck with Cairo, a workaround would be manual supersampling. Basically render it at a larger resolution (twice or 4 times the width and height), and then resize it to the correct size.