wyatt@cfa.harvard.EDU (Bill Wyatt) (10/27/88)
In article <74769@sun.uucp>, landman%hanami@Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman) writes: > >In article <74013@sun.uucp> landman@sun.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) writes: > >>Here's a hard lower bound. Studies have shown that 2-bit grayscale > >>gives you better "perceived" screen resolution than spending the same > >>bits on extra 1-bit resolution. [...] > 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, [... lots of interesting experimental results deleted ...] Hear! hear! I can attest to the beauty of fuzzy fonts. In 1980 or 1981 I went to see some spiffy interactive software demonstrated at the MIT AI lab. The software was great, but we all wanted to know HOW THEY GOT THOSE WONDERFUL FONTS! (They called them anti-aliased fonts, not `fuzzy'; guess the term is more recent.) They were so clear that they truly seemed to float just off the surface of the monitor. One point not mentioned in the above articles is that one of the reasons fuzzy fonts work is that they actually *increase* sharpness AS PRESENTED BY A CRT. This is because, in typical, aliased, fonts, the abrupt transition from 0 to 1 induces ringing in the electronics, showing as bluring at the pixel edge. By allowing a gradual step to full intensity in the right places, fuzzy fonts generate a much clearer perceived edge. -- Bill UUCP: {husc6,cmcl2,mit-eddie}!harvard!cfa!wyatt Wyatt ARPA: wyatt@cfa.harvard.edu (or) wyatt%cfa@harvard.harvard.edu BITNET: wyatt@cfa2 SPAN: cfairt::wyatt
waters@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jim Waters) (11/01/88)
Sorry to disappoint anyone, but at the talk given on the Stanford
campus a week or two ago, a Next representative said that their
current implementation of display Postscript does NOT use the grey
scale capabilities of the machine.
He didn't rule out future support of anti-aliasing, though....
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What's that? Don't I have anything really profound to say here . . . Nope.hwt@bnr-public.uucp (Henry Troup) (11/03/88)
Followups to comp.text... I happen to have the recent book _Digital_Typography_, Richard Rubenstein, Addison-Wesley, 1988, ISBN 0-201-17633-5. On page 111, he says On some kinds of output device... there is the possibility of using greyscale... for minimizing jaggies and creating more subtle shapes. This technique works because of tthe eye's ability to enhance edges when viewing shapes. Instead of seeing a soft edge, as actually displayed, a sharper one in an intermediate position is perceived. This useful ability allows intensity information to be substituted for spatial information.... Indeed, ...television... By careful design... avoids high frequencies during sampling that could cause alaising, and avoids reconstruction errors during display. ... Grey levels are particularly useful on displays with very limited spatial resolution, such as conventional TV sets used to display text. They have the additional benefit of diminishing text flicker resulting from interleaving, because greyscale equalizes the intensity between adjacent parts of letters in different fields. I highly recommend the book, as Rubenstein deals with many factors affecting WYSIWIG and its unattainability. He discusses the impact of the device characteristics (CRT, laser printer, etc) on font rendering, and why one set of fonts will not serve all purposes. (TeX users already know about write-white and write-black fonts). Henry Troup utgpu!bnr-vpa!bnr-fos!hwt%leibniz | BNR is not Bell-Northern Reseach hwt@bnr (BITNET/NETNORTH) | responsible for my Ottawa, Canada (613) 765-2337 (Voice) | opinions