Just how good is Xara's antialiasing?

[nwilkinson]

I have had this page live for around 15 months now. It shows the antialiasing capabilities of quite a few different applications, the particular emphasis being for web graphics.

Hmmm, I wonder which is the best ... any takers? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

IsoCalc.com Tutorials: look at the AA examples page.

Just check out some of the CorelDRAW images: those underlines and missing descenders are nothing to do with me, but are everything to do with Draw. And Illustrator does not fare well at all either.

Enjoy,

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[nwilkinson]

I have had this page live for around 15 months now. It shows the antialiasing capabilities of quite a few different applications, the particular emphasis being for web graphics.

Hmmm, I wonder which is the best ... any takers? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

IsoCalc.com Tutorials: look at the AA examples page.

Just check out some of the CorelDRAW images: those underlines and missing descenders are nothing to do with me, but are everything to do with Draw. And Illustrator does not fare well at all either.

Enjoy,

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[roman]

I saw your page before, you've done a great job on all that comparisons. Thumbs up. Nice to see that Xara still wins [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img]

[Wolfgang]

Nick,

since Xara wins (again), are you planning on a IsoCalc Version for Xara-X ??

I know this tool from the i-us days, but as I don't use Corel Draw it's of not much use to me ..

Wolfgang

[nwilkinson]

Wolfgang,

I would love to do a Xara version - I investigated the possibility back in 1999, but (then) CorelXara didn't expose a formal automation interface. And Xara X still doesn't.

Damn.

The closest I can suggest is:

1. The best application for technical illustrations, as in the line art, is CorelDRAW: I have used Xara, CDR, Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDRAW has the best _line_ tools.

2. Get hold of a cheap copy of CorelDRAW 7 Classic for about $25, plus IsoCalc (on offer to end of September), create the outlines there, and Cut'n'Paste them as CMX clipboard data (Xara offers this for anything copied from CorelDRAW).

3. Then do the cool rendery stuff in Xara.

This is, in fact, how several IsoCalc users work - 'illustrating' in CorelDRAW, then 'rendering' in Xara. And their artwork is, frankly, stunning - you know who you are!

Sorry I can't be more positive on the Xara-everything front - I assure you that as soon as I get a whiff of a Xara automation interface, IsoCalc will support it ... anyone know of one?

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Nick.

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[gwpriester]

Nick

I may be a bit predudiced but I think Xara has the best anti-aliasing engine you can find.

I think that CorelDRAW has the worst. And DRAW 10 is even worse as it anti-aliases horizontal and vertical edges. Hence, you cannot create a decent web graphic without getting the faint edge outline caused by this.

FreeHand 10 uses the Flash anti-aliasing engine which is not too bad and Illustrator 9 has gotten with the program too. But overall, Xara produces the cleanest and crispist images.

When DRAW first introduced blends on a path I created a chrome pretzel. While the effect was pretty cool, there were some noticable rough edges, even with 900 steps.

When Xara X introduced its blend on a path, I tried the same test.

The results speak for themselves.

I appologize for the large file size of this image but I wanted to present both images as cleanly as possible. The original JPEG images are compressed 20%.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~garypriester">
Be it ever so humble...</a>

http://www.thuntek.net/gwp/flag.jpg

[nwilkinson]

Gary,

Hmmm ... one at a time:

1. CorelDRAW: all versions pre 10 are completely rubbish. And I understand your concerns with Draw 10 - something that Corel's engineers don't seem to understand (they think that _all_ edges are _always_ 'blended' and calling it true antialiasing) and have gotten wrong. However, Draw is the best _line_ drawing application from an _engineering drawing_ point of view. Its line art exports are _good enough_. Any "artwork" would not be done in CDR anyway, that's why we all bought Xara, but for line art engineering drawings, it's the _line_ and not the _art_ that's most important.

2. Flash's antialiasing isn't brilliant, at least not the one that's implemented in the player. They had to compromise on accuracy and complexity in the interests of speed. If FH does use Flash's antialiasing then it's nowhere near Xara's or Fireworks' quality.

3. Illustrator's antialiasing is alright - and not better than that. In fact it's a bit too heavy. I haven't done any tests for over-antialiasing a la CorelDRAW 10. But the fact that you can't export the "selection", only the page, is a chronic oversight. When you think of websites and the dozens, even hundreds, of images you require, with Illustrator you have to have a separate file for each one. Maybe I am missing something, but I just find it an obstructive app to use for web graphics and the like.

4. Don't discount Fireworks: it gives several varieties of antialiasing for text. Also, its general antialiasing is as good as Xara's. It's just that Fireworks isn't really a proper "illustration" app, more of a web-graphics manipulation application. Great for image maps, toolbars, rollovers, remote rollovers, animations, optimization, etc, but I wouldn't want to actually _draw_ in it!

Xara's not perfect - it has its own foibles. However, its extremely fast re-rendering (just watch Fireworks crawl on the redraw), adequate antialiasing (okay, so it's great antialiasing, crisp, vibrant, droolsome, how-did-he-do-that-? quality), being a proper illustration application, and having great export options, wins it for me.

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[tonylondon]

Good one Nick,

I really enjoyed your tutorials, the results are quite surprising.

I've tried to use your test on other programs - Canvas 8 and Expression 2 to be precise.

What size type face did you use? How did you expand the files to 400%?

Would it be possible to define an illustration that would look at all aspects of AA, for example the points Gary raised?

Tony

[nwilkinson]

Hey, London Tone,

Whereabouts? Went to uni in Uxbridge meself, lived in Stamford Hill for a while, hate the noise, constant go, and distance to the country.

Anyway, thanks for your comments on that page. Took quite a bit of faff, I can tell you!

Very simply, the images are 12pt text rendered at 96dpi. Some applications only allow 72dpi, so need to be 16pt text. I could get into a debate about 96dpi vs 72dpi, but I won't [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

The sans serif text is Arial normal. The serif text is Times New Roman normal italic.

The enlargements are dead simple: I cropped out the bits of the two sentences that I needed. These are typically 30px by 15px. Then, in the HTML, I simply multiplied the width and height values in the <IMG> tags by four: by using a whole number, the browser doesn't try to do anything clever with the resize and simply uses 16 pixels (4x4) to draw each pixel from the image. I could've used an image editor to resize the images and add in all the extra pixels to give the same effect, but that results in bigger image files, so longer download times.

If you have the images for Canvas and Expression, I would be interested to take a look. Canvas particularly, since it recently knocked both CDR10 and AI9 off the top spot in PC Pro.

I could set out to define some tests. However, they have to be pretty basic, since the details of such tests may or may not be do-able in all applications. Also, if we head down that road, it may require a reworking of the page into several pages. I think it's worthwhile, but give me some time to develop a "test screen" -- any suggestions or examples welcome.

Hmmm, I think that might just work quite well, come to think of it. There are several things that need to be tested for:

1. Quality of antialiasing of text;
2. Q of aa of vectorized text;
3. Edge aa of rectangles (lying exactly on pixel grid);
4. Small circles;
5. Butted-up shapes (similar to Gary's test);
6. Parallel lines just off-vertical/horizontal;
7. Colour fringing (discordant fills overlapping);
8. Sub-pixel-width lines.

I think that that should cover most sins.

Cheers,

Nick.

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[Sean Sedwards]

Xara builds up its anti-aliasing in layers: the top shape is anti-aliased against the anti-aliased lower shape(s). Hence if you clone a shape on top of itself and change the colour, such that the lower shape should be completely obscured, the anti-aliasing is wrong because the top shape is not being anti-aliased against the background colour but against the a-a pixels of the lower shape.

This can be quite a useful feature when you want to make tiny text more readable, but very annoying if you're trying to hide what's underneath. It would be interesting to see how other apps. cope.

Regards - Sean