Small font sizes - text anti-aliasing

[Charles Moir]

Taken from another thread:

One thing I think missing is to set the antialias level of text.

This is not easy and not necessarily what you really want. You can have no anti-aliasing now, just turn down the quality slider one notch, but as you'll see, the results are not at all attractive.

Since Xara uses the exact same rendering mechanism for all vector objects and fonts this provide complete consistency and accuracy - the price is that small type is often blurred when it's not on whole pixel boundaries, and not whole pixels in size.

So we have the choice. Inaccurate positioning and spacing, but clearer text, or completely accurate rendering, but blurred text at small sizes. We opt for the latter.

But granted that, for example, ClearType font rendering is great - really better than any other font rendering technology by a mile - and way better than anything Adobe manage in terms of clear crisp readability at small font sizes. But it's not even slightly accurate. Not only do fonts not look anything like their outlines, but the weight and overall 'color' as they call it, of blocks of text is all wrong as well. And the font metrics are also wrong - the letter spacing, at certain sizes, can be very wrong. You'll find for example, that at certain size a tiny increment in point size has a huge jump in text size or boldness - and all font hinting systems suffer this problem. While this is, just about, acceptable for word processing, it's certainly not, in our opinion, acceptable for general graphics purposes or anything that purports to provide accurate WYSIWYG graphics and text display.

The benefit of the Xara approach is that you can do things like 'convert to shapes'. and there is no visible change. Our outline rendering and font rendering are 100% consistent. You can, for example rotate text and it remains very high quality. Just try, for example, rotating a block of text in Xara, and then compare against other products - especially Word or anything that uses ClearType - they are a complete disaster at any angle other than horizontal.

We have looked at offering Cleartype rendering options, but the technical and usability issues of inaccurate text spacing and rendering are a very high price to pay.

Having said all that we do understand there is a need, in special cases, for better pixel optimized text for things like buttons and very small labels for web use. Where outline accuracy or rotated text is not an issue. We did cover this in the July Outsider newsletter which everyone should get http://www.xara.com/news/july06/tutorial.asp

This shows two techniques for producing better quality type at small sizes. Either by careful manual positioning of the text and text point size, or using 'pixel fonts' that have been designed specifically to be readable at small font sizes. the latter is used by Flash designers regularly to solve the same problem.

That article shows there are solutions or techniques that can be used today in Xara Xtreme that can help.

[Xhris]

I've mentioned something like this in the past I think, and discussed similar stuff here, but will it ever be likely that Xara could one day make use of new graphics hardware to offer, say, superior anti-aliasing amongst a number of other possibilities?

What would be the technical difficulties, advantages or disadvantages in trying to use such hardware for Xara's processing?

I would personally love to see my insanely powerful graphics hardware being used to power Xara to new glory. It does wonders for my games.

[Charles Moir]

Well I'm not aware of any hardware that does superior anti-aliasing to ours - hardware anti-aliasing is normally quite crude actually. But hardware 2D graphics rendering is more interesting, but unfortunately very orientated to GUIs and games and not designed for and does not really help graphics software, especially software like ours that includes advanced rendering.

So to take XAML graphics for Vista (WPF as they now call it) - this can be accelerated in new graphics hardware, under Vista (i.e. if you have one of the graphics cards that does the fancy hardware window blurring etc - all very cool). BUT XAML graphics is very crude compared to Xara rendering. It only support two types of graduated fill - linear and elliptical. It only supports one type of transparency. I'm not totally sure, but I believe it does not support graduated transparency or if it does it will be Flash like - RGBA transparency which is considerably less powerful than ours. Effects such as feather would not be possible (but blur and soft shadows are).

So in order to take advantage of XAML hardware acceleration we'd have to remove a lot of the best Xara features. And even then it's too early to judge just how much speed gain you'd get - my initial impression of Vista graphics is that it's not very fast - even with hardware acceleration (is anything Microsoft do fast?)

On the other hand we do intend to take advantage of multiple processors or cores, and we think that has a lot more potential, and is a lot more beneficial in the long run. This is not going to happen in the near future, but we know how to do this and it is in the plan.

[Xhris]

I do find this very interesting. When I mentioned anti-aliasing, I was thinking like how you can set different AA settings in games - 2X, 4X, up to fancy rotation types, and even super-sampling.

This new CUDA thing NVidia's brought out on their G80 cards, is that something that Xara could take advantage of in the future? I read that people who want to get more processing power can write shader programs for the GPU to do science work and stuff.

[RickX]

So we have the choice. Inaccurate positioning and spacing, but clearer text, or completely accurate rendering, but blurred text at small sizes. We opt for the latter.

I understand, it should work the way it is now, but it would be nice if you have the choice to set a text object to no antialiasing. Ok, it messes up when you rotate it, just like in photoshop but when I design a website I just want the menu buttons or some 'lorem ipsum' dummy text displayed the way it will look when the design is converted to HTML.

So one little tiny button that you can press to disable text antialiasing on the selected text object should be a warm welcome.. and p.s. the quality of photoshop 'none' antialiasing setting is somewhat better than pulling the xara quality slider

Thanks for your reply.

photoshop 'none' antialiasing example:

[Charles Moir]

Yes the Photoshop 'none', uses fully hinted truetype monochrome rendering - and suffers from the size / spacing inaccuracies - e.g. that 12pt text is a LOT larger than, like 20 or 30% larger, than the 11pt text which is obviously wrong. It has to be 'one whole' pixel larger in all directions.

But yes it's useful feature and something we can look at for future versions. For now I'd recommend simply using pixel fonts to get that same effect.

[RickX]

What I sometimes do is just create the text in wordpad, make a screenshot, cut the text in PS and paste it into xara as a bitmap. It works but it's a time consuming workaround.

[jclements]

Of course, XPRO could ship with a greater variety of Pixel Fonts ... maybe?

[Nostaw]

What I sometimes do is just create the text in wordpad, make a screenshot, cut the text in PS and paste it into xara as a bitmap. It works but it's a time consuming workaround.

When working on a Webpage I do a similar workaround. I create the proper css font style I'm going to use for the webpage and display the text in a webbrowser, make a screenshot and import the screenshot back to xara. This way I know for sure how the text formatting will look like. Then again, different browsers show text differently.

Simply turning antialasing off wouldn't do the trick because web browsers display fonts differently than lets say Photoshop by using 'none'.

[Nostaw]

Of course, XPRO could ship with a greater variet of Pixel Fonts ... maybe?

You can always pixel your own Pixel-Perfect font: http://www.simplefont.com/