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Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps

Posted by pudge on from the mmm-pretty dept.

Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty."

3 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Is anti-aliasing really so great? by superposed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know anti-aliased text "looks" better than aliased -- more like a photo of the printed page, rather than a pixelated approximation. But I'm not so sure anti-aliasing really helps me read text more easily. I'm getting more used to it now, but in general, I think the extra "fuzziness" makes it harder for (my) eyes to make out the edges of letter shapes and quickly identify them. That is, I have generally found it a lot quicker and less-fatiguing to read well-hinted, high-contrast, sharp-edged, aliased text, rather than photo-like anti-aliased text.

    I think this is similar to the difference between reading pure black text (e.g., from a typewriter or laser printer) vs. reading text printed through a half-tone screen (e.g., in coarsely-screened photos or illustrations).

    Has anyone else had this experience? Does anyone have a more complete explanation for it?

  2. Re:Anti-Aliasing on TiBook by Yarn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I hate to say it, but maybe they should look into licensing ClearType From MS.

    Yes, it's MS, but it is designed for LCD displays, whereas it appears that the current system is designed for non-trinitron CRTs.

    --
    -Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
  3. Quartz text rendering  font aliasing by deleuze · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder why in this whole discussion about anti-aliased fonts in carbon apps or other operating system nobody mentions that quartz text rendering is more than simple anti-aliasing of glyphs (i.e. characters).

    if you render a single glyph not aliased, for readibility reasons you have to place it within the pixel matrix. The effect you get if you'd use some sort of "exact" glyph positioning was possible to see if you switched on the "fractional character width" in old classic applications (AppleWorks has this settings in the text preference); using this "exact" character width as opposed to "character width as necessary to the pixel matrix" gives you strange gaps between letters. the fractional character width gives you the same glyph placement at it would be printed on a high-resolution device like a printer.

    quartz adopts PDF rendering for exactly this reason. it's not anti-aliased single letters but anti-aliased "whole pages".

    i cannot understand the complaints about unreadable anti-aliased text in cocoa-applications. here it's possible to clearly read 6pt text -- as opposed to carbon apps where everything below 9pt is almost unreadable.

    btw in omniweb (in 4.1 beta/sneaky peaks) you can immediatly switch off text smoothing in the fonts & colors preferences dialog. simply set the "Smooth text larger than..." to 255.

    (this remarks should be rewritten by some native speakers)