curtj@pogo.WV.TEK.COM (Curt Jutzi) (10/11/89)
Just out of curiousity.. Are there any text applications on the
Mac or the PC that take advantage of their gray scale abilities.
It would make the text on the screen appear much sharper than
a simple black on white bitmapfont. In a 4 bit per pixel or
8 bit per pixel system, they have to write all the bits in there
any way. If you could add gray scale the clarity of the text
would be outstanding.
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__ __ /| Curt Jutzi (Jutz) Tektronix Inc.
((__ \ \'o.O` tektronix!curtj@pogo.WV Del. St. 63-356
\\ ! =(___)= (503) 685-3723 P.O. Box 1000
!!! U Wilsonville,OR 97070
o_@@--.\ ACK! PHHT!
(___, / halliday@cheddar.cc.ubc.ca (Laura Halliday) (10/12/89)
In article <7988@pogo.WV.TEK.COM> curtj@pogo.WV.TEK.COM (Curt Jutzi) writes: > > > Just out of curiousity.. Are there any text applications on the > Mac or the PC that take advantage of their gray scale abilities. >(stuff deleted...) > If you could add gray scale the clarity of the text > would be outstanding. Though I know of no commercial programs that do this, I've done it in some programs of my own. I found that I had some 240 dpi bitmap fonts floating around, and an 80 dpi screen (PS/2 VGA) to display them on. So I scaled the fonts down to 1/3 their original size in pixels, and used the additional information for anti-aliasing. Set the colour palette to some shades of grey, and you're off. The results are very nice to look at. > __ __ /| Curt Jutzi (Jutz) Tektronix Inc. > ((__ \ \'o.O` tektronix!curtj@pogo.WV Del. St. 63-356 > \\ ! =(___)= (503) 685-3723 P.O. Box 1000 > !!! U Wilsonville,OR 97070 > o_@@--.\ ACK! PHHT! > (___, / ...laura
ds@hollin.prime.com (10/17/89)
I'm not as sure as you are about the value of grays in characters. The only improvement I can think of would be to dither curves so they appear more curvy to the eye. But I think this effect would be less noticeable than eliminating the gray bits in favor of improving the resolution. Some experiments would be useful and perhaps necessary for answering the question. David Spector Prime Computer, Inc. ds@primerd.prime.com (until the layoff)
rosenstn@hi3.ACA.MCC.COM (Mark Rosenstein) (10/17/89)
In article <69500002@hollin>, ds@hollin.prime.com writes: > > Some experiments would be useful and perhaps necessary for answering the > question. > Folks might look at "CRT Typeface Design and Evaluation" by Walter Bender, Ruth Ann Crespo, Peter J. Kennedy, and Richard Oakley in Proceedings of the Human Factors Society, 31st Annual Meeting 1987. From the Abstract: "This paper discusses some of the current work to improve CRT readablility. Specifically, we have developed software to be used by a typography designer to design anti-aliased (or "grayscale") CRT typefaces. A new anti-aliased typeface was designed and tested for readablilty." From the Results: "The mean reading speed for text articles presented in hardcopy was 137.78 words per minute (wpm). The mean reading speed for the experimental font was 158.56wpm. The data suggests that proofreading with the new anti-aliased typeface on an analog color display is faster than from a hardcopy. This result is significant at the p = 0.05 level." Mark Rosenstein "Research: Trust the Process"
dfl@Think.COM (David Lively) (10/17/89)
David Spector (ds@primerd.prime.com) writes:
I'm not as sure as you are about the value of grays in characters.
The only improvement I can think of would be to dither curves so they appear
more curvy to the eye. But I think this effect would be less noticeable
than eliminating the gray bits in favor of improving the resolution.
Some experiments would be useful and perhaps necessary for answering the
question.
This technique is called "anti-aliasing". I can't tell you much more than
that. It seems to me that trading off the gray bits for more resolution
would be preferable, but you might want to look at the research on
anti-aliased fonts to see whether this is really true.
- David