20 Jul
2004
20 Jul
'04
3:38 p.m.
Patrick Useldinger wrote:
I did a little test at work. To my surprise, all the
collegues I asked
for their opinion preferred the AA version. I really don't understand, I
have been working on computers for 25 years now, and I never found
someone who said that he preferred a more fuzzy picture over a sharp
one. Only my girlfriend prefers the non-AA fonts. Maybe that's why she's
with me ;-)
I have experienced similar things. I immediately see if a LCD screen
doesn't use its real resolution. But I have seen other people at work
who do not even see a difference. I say that the picture is miserable if
the LCD screen has to interpolate pixels, but they do see nothing.
One thing that's more important to me than
WYSIWYG is my eyesight. The
fonts, as I experienced them im OOo, are causing a lot of strain to my
eyes and I refuse to work more that 5 minutes in such an environment.
Now, I think that you only have a problem when you use small fonts where
a character only consists of a few pixels. By using large characters
where every line consists of at least 4 pixels AA schould be no problem.
You can magnify the text under OO. Or buy a higher resolution monitor
(1280x1024 is fine ;-). The characters have been very small on your
screenshot.
Under MacOS X, there is a setting where you can say that the OS should
not use AA when the characters are smaller than x points.
I have to admit that I do not use much AA myself. My Mozilla doesn't use
AA, nor my Window Manager, my wterm, my editor and so on. But with
applications which show you the text on screen as it is printed
afterwards like Acrobat Reader, OO, xvdi, AA is not bad.
I mainly do not use AA where it is not needed, because I do want the
fastest desktop possible on my K6-2 500Mhz ;-) Therefore I do not use
KDE either ;-)
This does not mean that I do not want AA. It means
that something has to
be improved, either
1- the fonts I use
2- the AA that's running here
3- maybe some piece of hardware (monitor, graphics card).
Perhaps there are only 2 solutions:
- Wait until the tireless opensource developers have improved AA
- Use MacOS X if you want a Unix system with good font support
Font support on Linux has much improved on Linux the last few years.
Unfortunately, AA is not very efficient on the X protocol. So, if you
use X over the network, even if you have something faster than a
K6...... no fun
Greetings, Patrick Kaell