On Friday 25 March 2005 17:03, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > > Antialias support useless, and all this subpixel stuff is self-defeating > bullshit too. The only way screens can convey that information in a > non-ugly manner is for the resolution to be so big that you can't pinpoint > individual pixels without a magnifier, and this defeats the purpose of > these ugly kludges.
This is a minority view. The fact is that by increasing the colour depth, you are perceptively increasing screen resolution by at least conveying *some* of the information. A typical example is a very small 'w' arranged like this: Unantialiased: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Anti-aliased: 0 o 0 0 0 0 They may both look awful, but as part of a word on a hi-res monitor, the brain is fooled into thinking at first glance that the bottom version is a w. This all assumes that the font is well made in the first place. The standard unix 'fixed' font is nice for just displaying text and is very readable without anti-aliasing, but it's rare. The moment people try to make rounded shapes, particularly on LCD monitors which have square pixels, artefacts start confusing the eye into thinking it's looking at something more complicated than a simple letter. The default font for the menus in ion for example, is absolutely disgusting and covered in artefacts. The 'y' in 'Styles' is (a) running into the 't', and (b) has a big dark blob over the cross section which shouldn't be there. Badly made scaled fonts such as 'helvetica' should be banned from existence. As long as the fonts are good quality and most importantly, accurate (Bitstream Vera Sans springs to mind), they always increase readability by providing more information, regardless of what people's personal crusades against the technology may be.
