Blurry fonts, Act III

[Tallis]

OK, I have been sworn in, and I did read every single blurry font thread, including my own. I went through:

http://www.xara.com/news/july06/tutorial.asp

and set the origin ( of my animation ) to 0.8 pix and .8 pix, to compensate for xara origin being technically off by .2pix.

I installed the pixel font SS Sans Serif 7, 8 and 10 pt fonts from the xara shareware page.

Now, according to the tutorial above, I need to set my text to xy of an integer, so that my text will be clear.

Well, no go. Attached are my screenshots-

I made some text, then made copies with the mouse and dropped them in random places so as not to have the x,y of each the same. I wanted to see what will be clear.

1- 1st jpg attachment shows one of the text fields selected, and that the x,y end in .4 and .5 respectively. 2 others are all different tenths.

2- i hit the flash animation preview button, and this is what i see. My selected text is razor sharp, as is another that happened to also end in .4 and .5. The blurry ones end in coordinates xxx.9, yyy.6 and xxx.7, yyy.9

3- you see my origin is set to x,y offset of 0.8, 0.8 in xara preferences , and when combined with the article saying xara is off by .2, .2, text at even integers should be clear, and text with .1-.9 endings should be variously blurry. But it's not.

I also tried text anchored at even integers ( xxx.00, yyy.00 ) , although pictures were not included in this post, and they were blurry.

WHy the heck is text placed following all the rules, using pixel fonts, with coordinates of xxx.4, yyy.5 clear, and any other combinations not ?

I'm going nuts. By the way, the pixel font is 7 pt, and I specified exactly 7 pt that in the font bar when setting up. So I do have a 7pt pixel font set to 7pt text.

Thanks

[Tallis]

Could this be just a bug, then?

[David O'Neil]

Are you exporting at 96 dpi? Is your system using large fonts, or other fonts besides normal? Your system's resolution may be 120 dpi, or other non-standard value, in which case, you would need to export at 120 dpi to get the proper results, I believe.

Just guesses. Good luck with your problem.

[Tallis]

---------Are you exporting at 96 dpi?

Yup, 96 ( to make the screenshots?) Even if I wasnt, what I attached is certainly an accurate copy of what I see when I hit the flash anim preview button.

----------Is your system using large fonts, or other fonts besides normal?

No. No accessability mods on my winxp box.

----------Your system's resolution may be 120 dpi, or other non-standard value, in which case, you would need to export at 120 dpi to get the proper results, I believe.

Nope. See below.

Thank you for your input.

[Egg Bramhill]

My eyes are rubbish so I often miss the finer points. But here's an experiment. The screengrab below was a Browser preview of an XXPro file.

The font used was SW!FT_V01 an 8pt pixel font. Could someone tell me which is the sharpest?

[parahandy]

To me Egg the left hand column is sharper than the right hand column. Although not a lot

[David O'Neil]

Remember that you can use ZoomPlus for this problem. It gives interesting results.

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes Norman, I'd say that the left column just shades it. However each seperate "swift" in both columns is offset by 0.1 pixels to the left and up from the one above it. So you would expect the Top & Bottom lines of text in the left column to be sharp (as they are on complete pixel co-ords, as is the background rectangle) whilst the other lines of text to become blurry, but they don't.

I attach the xar file with the text converted to shapes.

[bcire68]

Just my two cents but...

It appears to me that the top and bottom of the left hand column are sharper while the middle of the right hand column is sharper, however my eyes aren't what they used to be.

Eric,

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers Eric. That's the way I would expect it to be, but my eyes are rubbish these days. I might need Davids ZoomPlus full time shortly!