Anti-aliasing Rules

Crazy_Vasey · Post by **Crazy_Vasey** » 2003-02-27 04:47am

Does anyone know a way to make Mozila's fonts look less ugly? Konq's fonts look all nice and stuff but I don't like the rest of the rendering and it messes up on more sites than Mozilla does.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-27 04:49am

His Divine Shadow wrote:
aaah, defending microsoft?
No, stating facts, just because something is from MS doesn't mean it's shit, thats a irrational basis and the use of the spelling M$, well that just lowers my opinion of peoples maturity, someone posted a real funny pic of that once.

come on. michrosoft have no clue how to handle grafics stuff which AA is part of. look at shit like MS photodraw. it eats up so many resorces that it will take like half an hour save a single 640X480 jpg if you apply about 5 or 6 filters. or it runs out of memory and cant save the pic at all and you loose all the work. besides that it´s a crapy program.

MS dont know shit about stuff like that.
Utterly irrational logic, anti-aliasing and graphics programs are so remotely related in usage and function, not to mention actual code, that the only real reason for this shit is some personal bitter bias against MS.

Yeah, even I give reasons why I don't like MS. They make some good stuff... like their stuff for macs- from what I've heard, since I have never used Mac OSX. Kind of ironic though that their mac stuff is better then their windows stuff- Office X > Office XP && IE5 for Mac has > standards compliance than IE6 for Windows. Games are pretty good, then again lots of them are made by outside developers and only published by MS.

What I'm really annoyed is their practice of breaking standards and extending and embracing them. Even now, IE6 has poor support for DOM2 DHTML, in favor of their proprietry stuff. Their web development tools generate proprietry code.

I use "M$" only when I'm pissed off.

MS's business practices will be defeated by Open Source, however M$'s lawyers will start bringing in stupid patents and force everyone to pay royalties. That and DRM, and legislation is the real threat from MS

On the other hand, HDS, you sometimes are kinda weird, like saying backward compatibility is holding on to the past, and that they should remove it from 64 bit processors. You cannot merely look at technical aspects, you have to look at compatibility too. What's wrong with holding on to backward compatibility with only a slight decrease in performance.

Salm, I notice your spelling and grammer has degraded considerably.

And dammit, for the third time, what is font hinting?

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-27 04:52am

On the other hand, HDS, you sometimes are kinda weird, like saying backward compatibility is holding on to the past, and that they should remove it from 64 bit processors. You cannot merely look at technical aspects, you have to look at compatibility too. What's wrong with holding on to backward compatibility with only a slight decrease in performance.

I've never said nor implied that to the slightest, I even said so in the thread, it confused the fuck out of me when people started saying that.

I said that AMD's approach is wrong because it extends the life of X86.
I said that I instead preffered IA-64/EPIC for being a superior design, I never said to chuck backwards compability.

About Open Source, I don't believe it'll become the mainstream, commercialism is the drive of progress, I think. hope, MS will shape up by itself anyway as long as pressure is kept on it.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-27 05:12am

Crazy_Vasey wrote:Does anyone know a way to make Mozila's fonts look less ugly? Konq's fonts look all nice and stuff but I don't like the rest of the rendering and it messes up on more sites than Mozilla does.

You have to recompile with --enable-xft. I don't think it's worth downloading 30 megs for smeared looking fonts, though it's a matter of personal taste. You probably can find it precompiled with AA somewhere though.

Crazy_Vasey · Post by **Crazy_Vasey** » 2003-02-27 05:25am

Pu-239 wrote:
Crazy_Vasey wrote:Does anyone know a way to make Mozila's fonts look less ugly? Konq's fonts look all nice and stuff but I don't like the rest of the rendering and it messes up on more sites than Mozilla does.
You have to recompile with --enable-xft. I don't think it's worth downloading 30 megs for smeared looking fonts, though it's a matter of personal taste. You probably can find it precompiled with AA somewhere though.

Oh joy. isn't mozilla one of those apps with an arcane build process as well?

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2003-02-27 05:56am

For Sams problem I think he's on his weekly day of gibberush he has from time to time when he suddenly for a few hours can't spell anything

Cap'n Hector · Post by **Cap'n Hector** » 2003-02-27 11:41am

Pu-239 wrote:Yeah, even I give reasons why I don't like MS. They make some good stuff... like their stuff for macs- from what I've heard, since I have never used Mac OSX. Kind of ironic though that their mac stuff is better then their windows stuff- Office X > Office XP && IE5 for Mac has > standards compliance than IE6 for Windows. Games are pretty good, then again lots of them are made by outside developers and only published by MS.

And dammit, for the third time, what is font hinting?

I've never used Office X, as I refuse to pay more for an office suite than I did for my OS, but Mac magazines have been raving about it...

I also refuse to use IE because I don't think it's the best browser. Before Safari came out, I used Chimera (Commander, a Mozilla verient) and OmniWeb...

Font hinting is a way to make fonts look good at low resolutions. If the font just gets scaled really small, parts of letters or whole letters can vanish. Font hinting guesses where pixels should be from the partial pixels that would have been displayed.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-02-27 12:17pm

Cap'n Hector wrote:Yes, you may.

Then I, being a Mac bigot, will be forced to point out that Mac users have had anti-aliasing since 8.6 enabled by default...

To be fair, the antialiasing in OS 8.6 was inferior to ClearType. Furthermore, Windows 98 had antialiasing as well, but only for larger font sizes (14 or 16 pt and above, I think, but certainly not 12 pt). Although it's a safe bet to say that Quartz antialiasing beats the crap out of everything else out there. Still, ClearType is a gigantic improvement over the jagged shit that was in Windows 2000. Although, the subpixel antialiasing used in ClearType isn't required for CRT's. Standard font smoothing is better for CRT's, as well.

Personally, I'm waiting for 300 dpi monitors, so we won't need antialiasing.

I've never used Office X, as I refuse to pay more for an office suite than I did for my OS, but Mac magazines have been raving about it...

They rave about it because it rocks compared to the Windows version. Compared to any decently-written Cocoa application, though, it's utter and total shit. Microsoft uses their own drawing code for both the Mac and Windows versions of Office, resulting in a lot of discrepancies between the way things are drawn in the rest of the OS and the way Office draws them.

I also refuse to use IE because I don't think it's the best browser. Before Safari came out, I used Chimera (Commander, a Mozilla verient) and OmniWeb...

IE5 on OS X is a piece of shit. I can't believe that a browser which hasn't received a major update in three fucking years is still in use. Yeah, it was good on OS 9, but on OS X, it blows. It has a really good rendering engine (definitely one of the best out there), but it's plagued with interface inconsistences and the fact that I just can't stand looking at it for more than 1 minute at a time. Though it is one of the few browsers which renders css/edge correctly (IE6 on Windows can't, of course). Safari kicks IE5's ass, especially the leaked beta with tabbed browsing.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-27 01:00pm

Crazy_Vasey wrote:
Pu-239 wrote:
Crazy_Vasey wrote:Does anyone know a way to make Mozila's fonts look less ugly? Konq's fonts look all nice and stuff but I don't like the rest of the rendering and it messes up on more sites than Mozilla does.
You have to recompile with --enable-xft. I don't think it's worth downloading 30 megs for smeared looking fonts, though it's a matter of personal taste. You probably can find it precompiled with AA somewhere though.
Oh joy. isn't mozilla one of those apps with an arcane build process as well?

There' s mini howto on doing that somewhere. I think it's titled mozilla-optimization. Look on tldp.org.

I think you also have to get the freetype sources, and sources for a bunch of other stuff. I already have much of that stuff anyways, since I'm running LFS.

Too bad it'll take forever to compile such a huge app on a 266mhz computer. Mozilla won't even run on a 120mhz PI.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-27 01:44pm

Durandal wrote:Although, the subpixel antialiasing used in ClearType isn't required for CRT's. Standard font smoothing is better for CRT's, as well

Standard font smoothin in XP does not smooth all fonts, so cleartype is the only way to get all fonts smoothed.

Now if only a new version of GDI where to arrive, vector based, though then I guess the mac fanatics on Ars will be crying copy cats, while they point and talk about how stoneage it is now, damned if you do, damned if you don't

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-27 02:10pm

Too bad all good antialiasing techniques are patented by either Adobe or Apple, so linux AA sucks. Software patents should be banned, and these companies should just keep them as trade secrets, since software cannot be as easily reverse engineered, as say, car components. This would allow people to independently develop the same thing. Either that, or shorten them, like Wong said. Then again, since these patents are actually innovative, unlike Amazon's patent on cookies and Unisys's patent on LZW, it would be acceptable to continue to grant the patents to Adobe and Apple. Continued innovation is important, and I can live without AA (I think AA sucks, makes fonts look smeared).

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2003-02-27 02:15pm

Cap'n Hector wrote:Yes, you may.

Then I, being a Mac bigot, will be forced to point out that Mac users have had anti-aliasing since 8.6 enabled by default...

I had it back on Windows 95, just a service pack they released

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-27 02:21pm

Nevermind, you probably could reverse engineer it by analyzing the placement of the pixels. Alright, then just shorten software patents to 5-10 years, instead of 15(20?).

ArmorPierce · Post by **ArmorPierce** » 2003-02-27 03:09pm

Heh, and I thought that this was going to be something about sock puppets.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-02-27 04:15pm

His Divine Shadow wrote:
Durandal wrote:Although, the subpixel antialiasing used in ClearType isn't required for CRT's. Standard font smoothing is better for CRT's, as well
Standard font smoothin in XP does not smooth all fonts, so cleartype is the only way to get all fonts smoothed.

Poor wording on my part. I forgot that there was a "Standard" font smoothing mode. I meant traditional antialiasing, which isn't subpixel.

Now if only a new version of GDI where to arrive, vector based, though then I guess the mac fanatics on Ars will be crying copy cats, while they point and talk about how stoneage it is now, damned if you do, damned if you don't

It's not quite that simple. Apple's original release of Quartz was slow as shit, and Microsoft will undoubtedly have the same problem. Apple chose to get the thing out there and get people used to it. Microsoft is opting to release it in a faster state, more than likely. Apple's been working on getting their vector stuff accelerated through OpenGL ("Quartz Extreme"), and I assume that Microsoft is working on getting GDI to run through Direct3D.

Of course, if what I've seen on Longhorn is any indication, Microsoft still lacks the artistic touch. Longhorn's GUI looks like serious ass. Too much shit packed in too little space. Good thing they have lots of time to refine it.

Pu-239: I don't know about Microsoft, but Apple's antialiasing technique in Quartz is very simple: render the character at 4x its actual size and then scale it down.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:46pm

Durandal wrote:To be fair, the antialiasing in OS 8.6 was inferior to ClearType. Furthermore, Windows 98 had antialiasing as well, but only for larger font sizes (14 or 16 pt and above, I think, but certainly not 12 pt).

The older method anti-aliased 12pt, IIRC it went down to 10 pt depending on your resolution.

Personally, I'm waiting for 300 dpi monitors, so we won't need antialiasing.

In the meanwhile you can always get IBM's ultra-expensive LCD

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:48pm

ClearType anti-aliasing works well on apeture grill CRTs as well (e.g. "Trinitron")

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:48pm

NF_Utvol wrote:
Cap'n Hector wrote:Yes, you may.

Then I, being a Mac bigot, will be forced to point out that Mac users have had anti-aliasing since 8.6 enabled by default...
I had it back on Windows 95, just a service pack they released

It was actually a PowerToy, IIRC.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:50pm

His Divine Shadow wrote:
Durandal wrote:Although, the subpixel antialiasing used in ClearType isn't required for CRT's. Standard font smoothing is better for CRT's, as well
Standard font smoothin in XP does not smooth all fonts, so cleartype is the only way to get all fonts smoothed.

This is because many fonts that were not TrueType, OpenType or Postscript did not define precise AA methods. Subpixel rendering algorithms help get around that.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:52pm

Pu-239 wrote:What's font hinting?

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/hinting/what.htm

Microsoft's typography site actually is pretty decent.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-27 04:55pm

Pu-239 wrote:Nevermind, you probably could reverse engineer it by analyzing the placement of the pixels. Alright, then just shorten software patents to 5-10 years, instead of 15(20?).

I doubt that it'd be that easy; there are not many people qualified in typography that don't already work for Apple, Adobe or Microsoft.

Cap'n Hector · Post by **Cap'n Hector** » 2003-02-27 05:14pm

Durandal wrote:Personally, I'm waiting for 300 dpi monitors, so we won't need antialiasing.

As of a few years ago, I'd heard of displays with resolutions of up to 4000 DPI, but I can't find a reference...

Here's a 200 DPI:
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/9908/1001.html

A 200 DPI display for sale:
http://www.meyerinst.com/html/oem/trueview/default.htm

No consumer level models seem to exist at this point. I suspect either e-paper or transmissive LCD displays will fill this niche.