[geeks] KDE "konsole" cluebat?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 @ 00:43 -0400, der Mouse said:

> >> There is nothing better then a good hand optimized bitmap font on
> >> low resolution displays like CRTs and LCDs.
> > ...except of course a hand optimized, sub-pixel rendered font which
> > looks like it was printed on paper, even on your low rez LCD... :)
> 
> "Looks like[sic] it was[sic] printed on paper" 

Pedantry without reference is so annoying.

> only if you count ugly pixelized fonts on paper - no matter what
> tricks software pulls, it isn't going to get anything down finer than
> the display device can render.

With the exception of just plain jagged fonts, fonts on my LCD don't
look even remotely like "ugly pixelized fonts on paper".

I'm not saying they look as good as my laser, I just said it looked like
it was printed on paper, and it does. It's is very good.

It is based on the same techniques used to remove jaggies on laser
printer fonts.

It makes the apparent resolution higher than the actual resolution.

> ("Sub-pixel" is a misnomer; it's just exploiting the way three
> physical screen pixels are driven off a single framebuffer pixel by
> splitting out the primaries.  

In other words, it uses sub-pixels, thus the name.

My laser printer uses the same basic principle to remove jaggies.

> It's still going to be in the 100dpi range, which is horribly coarse
> for paper.)

Actually, it is better than the majority of printers I've owned.

> I've seen paper printouts with pixels about as large as they are on
> screen and to my eye they don't really have anything over pixelized
> fonts on screen, except to the extent that paper has advantages over
> softcopy in general (which may be many to none, depending on the
> context).

I have.

Many years ago I had a clever hack that did sub-pixel rendering of fonts
on 24-pin printers. It worked with printers that could half-step the
heads.

It was slow of course.


-- 
shannon / Asus A8N5X - Opteron 170 at 2.5GHz | But you know, a little Sun Ultra 1
-------'  2GB RAM - nVidia 7900GS         | is doing all the hard work...