Re: [desktop]??Real users experience.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 01:54:57PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
> Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
>
> > Hmmm? Windows doesn't (last time I checked, which was yesterday) do
> > anti-aliased fonts, at least on XP.
>
> Of course it does. It isn't a new XP feature, either; Windows has had AA
> fonts at least sine Win2k/ME, possibly even Win98 or 98SE (I forget).
Win98 definitely had it, though I think it might have been in the Plus
pack. I seem to vaguely recall that some version of Win95 (OSR2
perhaps) might have had it in a plus pack of some sort, too.
It was off by default, though, partly because it makes fonts look
somewhat blurry, and partly because it makes font rendering a lot
slower, I think.
A well made font with a good font engine will look pretty good without
aa - similarly, a bad font, or a good font with a bad font engine, can
look bad with aa. As an example, look at how xft tends to render "2"
glyphs in Courier New tt fonts - it loses a whole stroke with aa!
Personally, I'm still convinced that at least half the ugly fonts
complaints aren't about AA at all, but instead are about bitmap fonts
that got scaled up, or bad rasterization, or just actual bad fonts.
-J
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