I'd like to try to answer your first two questions, I can't readily
answer the third.
Marc Audard wrote:
>
> What is the purpose of it?
To make fonts more easily readable.
> Is there a gentle soul to explain what the fonts antialiasing
> is?
1. When a character is displayed on a monitor, it is displayed as a
pattern of dots.
2. When a font designer designs a font for a certain display
characteristics (dots per inch, whatever), he designs it so it looks
good with those display characteristics.
3. Generally speaking, those dots are either "on" or "off". When he
makes that good looking design, he bases it on dots that are either on
or off.
4. Antialiasing is a way of improving the appearance of a character by
allowing dots to be "on" partway (shades of gray, or whatever color).
By adding dots with varying shades of gray, the eye can be fooled into
thinking the character is made with more dots than it really is made
with.
5. Going back to 2, if a (bit-mapped) font is displayed on a display
with the original intended characteristics, it looks good if the
designer did a good job (and within the limits of the display
characteristics -- at one dot per inch, no font on a computer screen
would look good).
6. If a bit-mapped font is enlarged, it is not likely to look as good
because the on and off bits will not be exactly where the original
designer intended them to be. The characters will look blocky.
7. Antialiasing is an automatic means of applying shades of gray to the
bits of the enlarged bit-mapped font to make it look better when
enlarged.
8. There are also things other than bit mapped fonts -- they might be
called vector or vector based (or something). They are better suited to
being enlarged. I don't know whether antialiasing helps them also, or
whether perhaps antialiasing is somehow automatically applied when a
vector based font is enlarged.
I'm sure someone will point out where I've led you astray.
> How can we see if this option
> works or not?
I don't have a definitive answer for this -- partly is, "do they look
good", but that's not the entire answer because fonts can look bad for
other reasons.
Hope this helps, or provokes clarifying discussion,
Randy Kramer
