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autarch (914)

autarch
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http://www.vegguide.org/

Journal of autarch (914)

Thursday March 14, 2002
05:22 PM

Anti-aliasing

[ #3536 ]

So what is it exactly about anti-aliasing that's supposed to be so great?

I just installed the latest Mozilla, 0.9.9, which among other things, touts its ability to display AA text via the freetype2 library.

So I try it out. Yes, things are less jagged. But only because they're _freaking_ blurry. I started developing a headache in about 20 seconds. Ugh.

At least without AA I can read, even if it's not incredibly gorgeous. I'm sure AA works nicely for games and whatnot but for text sharp edges are where it's at.


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  • Anti-aliasing is lame for small type. I personally don't like it for type smaller than about 16 point. Most major fonts have a few idea display sizes, and AA only makes them worse. But at large sizes, AA rocks.

    • My minium font size is set to 18 points and I thought it still looked horrible.

      Maybe it was the particular font though.
      • Contrary to popular rumour, small type does look good with AA.

        The problem is with many fonts and many AA systems. Fonts need data to specify how they should cope at smaller sizes (e.g. scaffolding and so on), and the AA engine needs to actually be a good engine.

        Best I ever saw was on Acorn RISC OS [acornuser.com]. That was over a decade ago. One wonders what the font people spend their time on.

        One day, I hope for metafont fonts to catch on and for them to be well aliased. I like metafont because it is aware of the fact
        --
          ---ict / Spoon
  • I tried 0.9.9's AA too and it's just AWFUL. I tried all the different options and couldn't for the life of me make it look good. However I *do* have a nice looking KDE with AA fonts (all point sizes, even small ones - mostly because the small size fonts look like shit without AA). It seems Mozilla must use a different set of code for doing the AA stuff than XRENDER does. I'm not really sure how or why. I'll show you the desktop in San Diego this summer.
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