Antialiasing, in fact, is an absolute requirement for some of us
foreign-language users and odd-ball font users. The following little-known
phenomenon makes fields totally useless for half a dozen characters in the
upper half of one-byte character sets: they will not display at all unless
antialiasing is turned on. They display the rectangles that are used in
Windows and Mas OS for undefined characters. Turn antialiasing on, and they
display fine.
The source of the problem is this: Director uses bitmap fonts to display
non-antialised text (which includes all field members, cast windows, and
D's text editor), but it uses outline fonts to display antialiased text.
Even in the more popular fonts that come with Windows and MacOS, there are
a few upper-ASCII/ANSI characters that have outlines, but do not have
bitmaps. Some of these are the so-called "control" characters. That notion
has been outdated for years, yet still affects some of the commerical
fonts. Even though in some of the non-English code pages these slots are
occupied by letters of the alphabet, some font makers consider them
"non-printable" and will not provide bitmaps for them. Outlines are usually
provided, so when your text is antialiased, everything is fine. Check out
characters 128, 142, and 158 (decimal) in some of your fonts--see whether
they display in cast windows, field windows, Director's own text editor,
and text members with and without antialiasing.
I haven't gotten my D 8.5 yet, but this is verifyable in D7 and D8 on both
platforms.
Slava
At 12:48 PM 6/15/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>>To be honest, though, unless you want editable text, the only benefit the
>>text member has is its convenience
>
>Are you including anti-aliasing as a convenience? That's a pretty big one
>for me.
>
>I find your idea of using png files intriguing. I guess you couldn't do
>much in the way of text manipulation, but it's a good idea for titles and
>the like.
>
>
>Cordially,
>
>Kerry Thompson
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