oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (05/10/89)
In article <60053@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> jellinghaus-robert@yale.UUCP writes: >1) Will support for gray-scaled, anti-aliased fonts be used in System 7.0? > Anti-aliased fonts are fonts in which the edges of the letters are smoothed > by gray pixels. 14 months ago, I wrote a program that given a Macintosh font, generates a half-size gray-scale, anti-aliased font, of maximum sharpness. (So gray pixels occur mostly infrequently, along curves, and rarely along every pixel of an edge, where they are percieved as blur.) These fonts are almost useless. 1.) because almost all existing text editing programs use one-bit deep offscreen bitmaps, so when text is drawn offscreen, then CopyBits()ed to the screen, all the gray pixels turn black. 2.) because the existing architecture doesn't provide any easy way to use gray-scale fonts if the destination is the CRT, but substitute a higher-resolution, non-grayscale version, if the destination is a printer. Now, if some major wordprocessor vendor would like to get a jump on the competition by licensing my anti-aliasing technology from me, and upgrading their product to use multi-bit per pixel offscreen pixmaps, and do the appropriate substitution at print time, come talk to me. --- David Phillip Oster --"When we replace the mouse with a pen, Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --3 button mouse fans will need saxophone Uucp: {uwvax,decvax}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --lessons." - Gasee
major@bbn.com (John Major) (05/04/90)
Back when Mac color first appeared (remember, Virginia?),
there was a flurry of requests for "fuzzy fonts", or
"anti-aliased" fonts, that subsided with disappointed sighs.
They are also known as "grey-scale" fonts, as the bitmap
representation uses levels of gray to smooth the edges of the
characters. They are *supposed* to be dramatically easier on
the eyes. Now, a excellent, shrink-wrapped tool has finally
arrived to create them -- FontStudio, by LetraSet. BUT -- has
anyone built any? Does anyone out there KNOW anything about
them? I started making my own, character by character, but
really now, there must be whole libraries out there of
bitmaps, right? Tell me it's true! So:
Does anyone have any grey-scale font bitmaps --
preferably 4 levels of grey, to go with the standard Apple cards?
Does anyone know of any articles or books that explain
the finer points of creating them? (for instance, is
4 bits of grey too little?)
Let's get the ball rolling on this one!
Thanks -
John Major
major@spcink.bbn.com
617/873-8165