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From: fox@garfield (David Fox)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics,comp.text
Subject: Re: Gray-scale antialiasing (yes, it can work)
Keywords: grayscale fonts, filters
Message-ID: <6022@columbia.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 88 23:05:07 GMT
References: <74013@sun.uucp> <148@internal.Apple.COM> <4763@mnetor.UUCP> <8811112202.AA21230@explorer.dgp.toronto.edu> <2226@ficc.uu.net>
Sender: news@columbia.edu
Reply-To: fox@garfield.UUCP (David Fox)
Organization: Columbia University CS Department
Lines: 29

In article <2226@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>[Re: variable pitch greyscaled fonts for editing, etc...]
>
>I don't know. Maybe it's just me but my experience with wysiwyg editors for
>technical stuff (both programming and writing technical documentation) has
>been pretty uniformly negative. I hope you agree, at least, that a program
>should definitely be edited in a fixed-pitch font.

I agree that it is preferable to edit programs in a fixed pitch font.
However, with anti-aliased fonts the pitch need not be an integral
number of pixels.  You could, for example, use a 4.5 by 6 pixel font
instead of a 5x7 font, turning a 24x80 screen into a 28x89 screen.

I don't think the question "Are anti-aliased fonts better or worse
than regular fonts" is really the question we want to ask.  In signal
processing terms, the question would be "What is the best
reconstruction filter for displaying text?"  Up until now all we have
much experience with is the box filter, where the value of the entire
pixel is the value of the infinite resolution font sampled at only one
point.  (Really no filter at all.)  I don't think that this lack of
experience with other filters justifies the opinion that the box
filter is the best.

David Fox
fox@cs.columbia.edu

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