Subpixel Antialiasing

So now even your old OS will look like you smeared Vaseline on the monitor? I can't be the only person who finds text in OSX nearly illegible.

you're not.

for those of us who think OSX looks muddy, there's a nifty preference pane called "tinker tool" at the apple site which lets you customize the amount of antialiasing your system typography actually has. also allows you to change your system fonts.

I downloaded this thing, made it active, took one look at my screen and went to the eye surgeon for repairs.

It's no good!

Proper anti-aliasing has to be done by hand, because there's not enough money to get somebody to write a good enough algorithm. But there seem to be technical obstacles, on both platforms.

Greg has come up with his own interpretation of ClearType - ie a rendering technique that only works on vertically striped digitally addressed color LCD displays. ClearType has very little to do with regular anti-aliasing. Clive has some good articles on Fontzone.

> ClearType has very little to

> do with regular anti-aliasing.

True, CT is not anti-aliasing.

But neither are the two mutually exclusive.

Now if only someone could make it work on a pivoting monitor in portrait mode. Why are we still all tied down to landscape? Why didn't that new iMac pivot? Grrr.

Ah, it's not so bad. Nothing that I haven't gotten used to for the last three years I've been using it, at least. Sure, it's a stark contrast to bitmapped type, but it's an aquired taste and any font over 12 pt. looks nice and, well, smooth. I'm sure when we've reached the capabilities of 300dpi monitors, we won't have to worry about type being anti-aliased.

It's a shame Greg hadn't fixed the bugs with IE in this new version, though. I was hoping for that.

John:

I actually think landscape is better. Human vision is naturally horizontal, not to mention that we write horizontally too! (Noting that my TMF site is horizontal.) AFAIK, the main reason for the existence of portrait is the erstwhile use of livestock hide as a writing medium.

Down10:

I agree with the "get used to" factor, but there's also the issue of readability. The biggest problem with most automatic AA schemes is that they end up making the body of the letters gray - no good. It only starts looking good above 20 PPEM. Sure, hi-res monitors will [mostly] solve the problem, but while we wait, we should think of improvement.

hhp

Hmmm,

Greyman & Unibody

Akiem: I've seen that before, and it's too bad that I can't get it to work as an actual font file (at least on a mac) via the bitfonter demo I've used or anything else for that matter.

Akiem: exactly.

Now if you could only make working fonts like that...

hhp