mw2k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Miles Asher Weissman) (10/27/88)
Way back in April 87 when the Mac II was introduced, Apple
proclaimed that Fonts could have color, or grey scale. In the next
few months to follow I have since seen one "Demo" font package with
color display characters (All I remember is Patriot being one of
them). These were nice and pretty, however quite useless for the most
part.
A post on comp.sys.next, has reminded me of the other use of
Anti-Aliased fonts:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>From: landman%hanami@Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Date: 26 Oct 1988 18:39:59 GMT
This comes from "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT" by Stewart
Brand, p.170ff, which is Copyright (c) Stewart Brand 1987. Nicholas
Negroponte is the director of the Media Lab.
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The Media Lab has in its history a fine example of wrong exploiting - an
excellent, simple idea, instantly applicable, available free to anyone,
that has sat on the shelf in plain view of the world since 1971.
Called Fuzzy Fonts, it is a cheap way to have much higher resolution print
on computer and TV screens. Negroponte: "It's not subtle. When you see
it, you gasp." He's right. Characters on the screen look just beautiful,
like on paper, and you can read them even if they're tiny. On a TV set
ordinary fonts are usually presented forty characters on a line, maximum
sixty characters. Fuzzy Font characters are still easy to read at eighty
characters per line, and you can go up to 100.
"Having to look at stairstep characters and jaggies should be against the
law," declares Negroponte. "Aliased fonts should be an OSHA violation."
Aliased fonts are what you see on almost all computers. Each square pixel
(picture element) on the screen is either black or white: one information
bit per pixel. The problems come when you're representing a sloping line
and you see a jagged edge instead, or the serif at the tail of a character
is smaller than a pixel and it disappears entirely.
"Anti-aliasing" smooths the jaggies by introducing a little gray in the
right places. With two-bit pixels instead of one-bit you have the choice
of black, white, or two shades of gray. That disappearing serif can be
represented by a light gray pixel, and your eye reads it as a serif. It's
cheap because doubling the resolution this way only doubles the cost,
whereas doubling the resolution by doubling the number of pixels quadruples
the cost - four jaggy one-bit pixels instead of one fuzzy two-bit pixel.
Negroponte: "I personally have exposed tens of thousands of people to
Fuzzy Fonts since Paula Mosaides - I remember her name because she was
Greek - got us started with this back in 1971. The only semi-convincing
argument against it I've heard is from people who claimed that the eye
seeks out crisp edges, and if it encounters nothing but fuzzy edges it
gets much more tired. That turned out to be wrong. Acuity is sharpness
of the image; resolution is some measure of the finest level of detail
that you can read. They are not the same at all. You can give up acuity
and gain resolution.
"Now, IBM ran an experiment where they presented the reader a page with a
number of typographical errors in it, and the person was supposed to read
the page and find the typographical errors. They would do it on paper,
then do it on a screen with different errors but the same number of them.
With a normal IBM or Macintosh screen they were something like 60 percent
less efficient than on paper. Then they antialiased the fonts and put in
the same kind of errors, and people came up with 98 percent of the
efficiency of paper. So Fuzzy Fonts on a screen are the closest
approximation to paper in terms of your ability to read them."
Another test had people bringing a line on a screen to just touching a circle
on the screen. If the line and the circle were anti-aliased with a little
gray with two-bit pixels, the people were twice as precise. It is not just
an aesthetic effect. Fuzzy Fonts may be the Media Lab's single most proven
commercial idea. Why it had to wait until 1987 to become a product is a
mystery. (Apple finally introduced Fuzzy Fonts on their second-generation
Macintosh computers in spring, 1987, followed by IBM.)
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END OF EXCERPT FROM COMP.SYS.NEXT
So what has happened, with the capability?? When will Adobe come out
with their version of Anti-Aliased bit-mapped fonts? (Apple is almost
guarenteed not to). And finally, will Adobe ever come out with Anti-Aliased
outline fonts?
- Miles Weissman
President Carnegie Mellon University's Mac Users' Group
ARPAnet: mw2k@andrew.cmu.edu
Phone: 412-268-4283