So what is it exactly about anti-aliasing that's supposed to be so great?
I just installed the latest Mozilla, 0.9.9, which among other things, touts its ability to display AA text via the freetype2 library.
So I try it out. Yes, things are less jagged. But only because they're _freaking_ blurry. I started developing a headache in about 20 seconds. Ugh.
At least without AA I can read, even if it's not incredibly gorgeous. I'm sure AA works nicely for games and whatnot but for text sharp edges are where it's at.
Anti-aliasing is lame for small type. I personally don't like it for type smaller than about 16 point. Most major fonts have a few idea display sizes, and AA only makes them worse. But at large sizes, AA rocks.
Re:Not with Small Type
autarch on 2002-03-14T22:54:29
My minium font size is set to 18 points and I thought it still looked horrible.
Maybe it was the particular font though.Re:Not with Small Type
koschei on 2002-03-16T04:02:02
Contrary to popular rumour, small type does look good with AA.
The problem is with many fonts and many AA systems. Fonts need data to specify how they should cope at smaller sizes (e.g. scaffolding and so on), and the AA engine needs to actually be a good engine.
Best I ever saw was on Acorn RISC OS. That was over a decade ago. One wonders what the font people spend their time on.
One day, I hope for metafont fonts to catch on and for them to be well aliased. I like metafont because it is aware of the fact that the same font should look different at different sizes rather than just being scaled up and down. Stroke dimensions have to change as well.
