New Xaraxone Nav Images

[Nathan Heagy]

They are anti-aliased using Clear Type-like rgb anti-aliasing? That's bizarre, no? How was that done? Gary?

This isn't some new feature of Xara X 2, is it?

Nathan Heagy
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[Nathan Heagy]

They are anti-aliased using Clear Type-like rgb anti-aliasing? That's bizarre, no? How was that done? Gary?

This isn't some new feature of Xara X 2, is it?

Nathan Heagy
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Cow Comics!

[diniel]

Right you are Nathan, I tried making an X in Xara X myself, and the anti-aliasing is completely different - shown here to save others repeating what I just did [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[gwpriester]

Nathan

I would love to tell you that I did some special kind of magic or that I have this fabulous new discovery. I just created a GIF.

About the only thing I can think of is the more colors you use (256 vs 16) the more colors Xara uses to create the image. Even if the image only has a handful of colors.

The main thing is does it look good or bad? My eyeballs are so shot it is hard for me to tell.

Gary

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The Xara Xone

[diniel]

Gary,

My interest in your unintentional discovery is that Xara X's anti-aliasing is not very good at creating legible small text when exporting as a GIF.

We've seen other packages creating GIFs with identical fonts and sizes, but XX's blurry edges were among the worst for legibility.

Perhaps the RGB anti-aliasing that you happened upon makes for easier-to-read text than the greyscale antialiasing Xara deploys.

I tried your suggestion of exporting the image at a low (8) number of colours, as well as a higher number (256, though Xara could only possibly use 71 of those), but as you can see from the image below - subtle steps are missed, but the basic idea of the anti-aliasing is a series of stepped blacks rather than the funky colours you got somehow.

Perhaps you could have another go, and do a side-by-side comparison of very small text to see if it's legible?

[gwpriester]

It just occurred to me, NetObjects Fusion creates bitmap images sometimes too. The text you are referring to may very well have been created by NOF and not by Xara.

You can buy very small bitmap fonts by the way. I know that Dickman has used these on Graphics.com for his small text.

Gary

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The Xara Xone

[Nathan Heagy]

If you look at the images you'll see that the shift is to red on one side and green on the other. This seems to be like Clear Type on Windows or "Medium" on OS X. What it does is on LCS panels it anti-aliases at the sub-pixel level. Since each pixel on an lcd screen is really three very thin pixels in a specific order - rgb - you can turn on just a third of a pixel's width by making a pixel more green or red than usual. Did I explain that right?

So I think this aliasing is intentional, at least by some software. So Gary, do you have an lcd screen with Clear Type turned on?

Nathan Heagy
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Blow Your Beef Away
Cow Comics!

[gwpriester]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> So Gary, do you have an lcd screen with Clear Type turned on? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I must. I have a DELL 17" flat panel display and Windows XP. So if this is the case then it was not set up thus by me. I just plugged the components together and turned on the machine and have not adjusted anything in a year.

Gary

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The Xara Xone

[diniel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>You can buy very small bitmap fonts by the way. I know that Dickman has used these on Graphics.com for his small text.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Or you can take a look at http://www.dafont.com/en/bitmap.php and choose from the 200+ bitmap fonts, most of which are free. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

I still use Sean Sedwards's SS_ fonts though, they're still the best. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/cool.gif