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From: osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Soft Fonts
Summary: Are Soft Fonts here yet?
Keywords: fonts, greyscale
Message-ID: <13376@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 19 May 91 17:09:35 GMT
Reply-To: osborn@ux1.lbl.gov (James R Osborn)
Distribution: all
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Lines: 42
X-Local-Date: Sun, 19 May 91 10:09:35 PDT


I ran across a (very old) posting that I saved from a few
years ago by - Oliver Steele - at Apple.  The post was about
Soft Fonts.  For those of you who don't know what these
are, essentially they are antialiased fonts.  They use two
or more bits of screen depth to represent characters which
are claimed to be vastly more legible and comfortable on the
eyes - especially with small sizes (like 9 pt).  Supposedly 
the soft fonts increased reading speed (even over hardcopy)
and reduced fatigue - I believe it.

There were two technologies mentioned for generating these.
First, you could convolve them from bitmaps with higher
resolution.  For example you could take the bitmap for an
18 pt font and apply a process to create a 2 bit deep 9 pt
greyscale soft font from this.  The second approach was to
use a scan conversion algorithm directly with the outline
for the font.

Well, the latter course is preferred because it will generate
more acurate representations of the font, and because it is
probably faster.  Well?  We *HAVE* TrueType now!

Wouldn't it be neat if you had an INIT (ah...ahem...extension)
that would patch into the text rendering routines in the system
and substitute a soft font when drawing to a color screen?
This hypothetical INIT could use TrueType outlines and generate
the soft version on the fly using scan conversion and then
perform the usual CopyBitsing to the screen.

My eyes would thank this INIT if it existed!  Anybody working
on such a beast?  I'd pay money for it...hell I'd even *WORK*
on it, it sounds so neat!

-- James

.------------------------------.--------------------------------------.
| James R. Osborn              | It just goes to show you it's always |
| Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory | something.  Either it's unclear tech |
| osborn@ux1.lbl.gov           | notes or your mac is smoking.  It's  |
| (415) 548-8464               | always something...                  |
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