Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Aliased GNOME and Mozilla
Ur@eus writes "Want to see how nice your GNOME desktop and Mozilla browser will look anti-aliased? We have just posted screenshots and a
non-stable patch on Gnotices" Here's evolution and
mozilla displaying slashdot. Neither are perfect, but its still exciting to see progress.
Moreover, I can't argue that scalability, reliability, efficiancy and the like are more important than having fonts with smooth edges. Still, for my surfing dollar, Windows has been my platform of choice precicely because of the smooth edges on the fonts.
Sounds silly, doesn't it?
But hey, silly first impressions count for a lot. People buy iMacs because they look cool. People spend thousands to make their cars look faster with body kits and the like. And people think that Windows is more advanced because it looks cleaner. It's not logical or fair, but it's true.
Anyhow, kudos to the Gnome crowd for getting this done. Now if only "Gnome" didn't automatically remind me of that "Scary Indian Fakir with No Legs and the Squeaky Cart" episode of the X-Files a few weeks back (shiver)....
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
but will it make it anti-biased?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm reading an article on slashdot about screenshots. Click on the screenshot and it shows the article on slashdot!
Which came first? The article or the image?
I feel like my brain is about to blow core.
Text of this sort is called "aliased", for reasons which escape me.
It is called aliased because of the boundary effects. In essence, when a glyph is rasterised for display without anti-aliasing, a binary decision is made as to whether or not a given pixel is on, depending on how much of the pixel would be filled if the screen were of infinite resolution. This causes an effect called aliasing, where the boundary of the glyph is not in the same place in the theoretical infinite resolution raster and the real screen (printer, whatever) resolution. The boundary of the glyph is aliased to the boundary of the pixel.
With anti-aliasing, the intensity of a pixel is a function of how much of the pixel is covered by the glyph being rasterised. For mid-to-large size fonts, this results in a much improved visual appearance, since, to the eye, the boundaries appear to be where they would be with a screen of much higher resolution. For small font sizes, anti-aliasing usually blurs the gylph beyond recognition.
Antialiasing basically means blending the edges - not so bad that things appear "blurry", just that they have smoother blends from one edge to the next. Fonts are usually the easiest to appreciate - they look finer, more distinct, as opposed to blocky and pixelated. They're smoother, easier on the eyes.
What's your damage, Heather?
The slashdot screenshot referenced was done using an older version of some color code; this has since been fixed. I've placed a new screenshot in place of the old one.
There's a few buglets, but they're mostly related to memory usage and getting the right font based on the requested X font; other than that, things work fairly well.. (I run my entire desktop antialiased with only minor glitches).
Well, All systems use a few standardized fonts like Verdana, Arial, Heveltica, etc... Sometimes these fonts will try and get sneaky and change their names to something like Deep Throat, Professor X, or Batman so that when you open up Microsoft Word, you won't know where your favorite font is. Anti-Aliasing is a method to keep your fonts from changing their names without your consent.
The screenshots PNG's have transparency and therefore look lousy under Netscape 4.x. To see how they really look, you'll need to use either Mozilla or a standalone image viewer.