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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps 40

Posted by pudge from the mmm-pretty dept.
Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty."
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Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps More

Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps

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  • I just installed it, and using the AIM for OS X was telling a friend about it, when the text I typed in wasn't appearing...

    Bound to happen I guess. But niffty idea! Thanks!

  • hmmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by linuxbert ( 78156 ) on Saturday June 08, 2002 @12:31AM (#3663837) Homepage Journal
    who would have thhought they could make carbon shiny. damm those folks are good :)

    anti-alaising is sweet, and much missed by me, now i am happy.

  • Not 100% great... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Elian ( 10270 )
    I've found some fonts that don't work at all well with anti-aliasing. I ended up having to turn it off in PowerPoint, as they end up being the fonts that I like to use in presentations... :(
    • Have you uploaded this week's service update (10.1) for Office v.X? From what I've heard, this takes care of most anti-aliasing problems with Quartz & Office.
      • Yup, I've got the update. Got it before I installed silk, and the fonts in question had problems with anti-aliasing enabled then. And in AppleWorks under OS 9 with fractional character widths turned on. It's definitely the fonts that have mildly whacked medatada somewhere, not PowerPoint or Quartz. Still, they look good without the extras, so I've no cause to complain.

  • thanks, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wizbit ( 122290 ) on Saturday June 08, 2002 @02:18AM (#3664032)
    i don't see all-encompassing quartz anti-aliasing support as some sort of OSX holy grail. some applications look nice with antialiasing, others look downright ugly. it's nice that this hack lets you specify which programs you don't want it to apply antialiasing to, but i'd much rather it worked in reverse. allowing me to try out the look of an app with antialiasing would be useful in determining if it's feasible to keep it activated.

    as it stands, there are a plethora of available apps built with ATSUI text rendering (understand that they take a significant speed hit in doing so), and more productivity apps are being updated daily. i LOVE chimera's option to disable "text smoothing" as it really does give credence to their claims that Apple needs to get on the ball with speeding up quartz antialiasing. and 10.1.5 DOES help this problem somewhat - i had downloaded an early (also hackish) version of Mozilla linked with ATSUI text rendering and it seemed much slower than my vanilla Mozilla install performed under this hack.

    this is a very cool thing indeed, but antialiasing isn't the be-all end-all of the OS X user experience.

  • Is anti-aliasing really so great? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by superposed ( 308216 ) on Saturday June 08, 2002 @02:56AM (#3664105)
    I know anti-aliased text "looks" better than aliased -- more like a photo of the printed page, rather than a pixelated approximation. But I'm not so sure anti-aliasing really helps me read text more easily. I'm getting more used to it now, but in general, I think the extra "fuzziness" makes it harder for (my) eyes to make out the edges of letter shapes and quickly identify them. That is, I have generally found it a lot quicker and less-fatiguing to read well-hinted, high-contrast, sharp-edged, aliased text, rather than photo-like anti-aliased text.

    I think this is similar to the difference between reading pure black text (e.g., from a typewriter or laser printer) vs. reading text printed through a half-tone screen (e.g., in coarsely-screened photos or illustrations).

    Has anyone else had this experience? Does anyone have a more complete explanation for it?

    • Evolution (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is new ground....the recommendation is to experiment w/various screen resolutions and monitor (OSD) settings to find the most 'pleasing' configuration for you.

      Things like ambient light, text vs. graphics and eye posture (do you wear glasses....are they specifically designed for working w/computer monitors. etc.) are all factors that can affect viewing, and with new technologies like Quartz, we'll need time to learn how to optimize the otherwise disparate components.

      Pixeless screen resolution and the phrase'paper like' are items and terms we now need to learn and use.
    • I have also found that anti-aliased fonts are difficult to read. I think the reason is partly the "fuzziness" that you talk about. But the letters also look dimmer. Since the color is spread out over more pixels, there are fewer pixels that are actually solid black. Most pixels become some shade of grey and are harder for the eye to pick up. I am leaving it turned on for a while to see if I get used to it. But it's not a clear advantage.

      Devon
      • I think you may have it exactly right. I only have problems with antialiased text when the font size is small. If the strokes of the aliased text are solid black and one pixel wide, they usually become two pixels wide and middle-gray when they are antialiased, which makes them much harder to read. Also, once the "natural" stroke width drops below a pixel (i.e., very small text), antialiasing seems to help again -- I can recognize the patterns of tiny fuzzy text more easily than tiny distorted text.

        I think this problem may be more pronounced on digital flat panels (e.g., my iBook). CRTs are much fuzzier than LCDs at the individual pixel level to begin with, so anti-aliasing may help (or at least not hurt) them, while it makes text less sharp on an LCD.

        There's an interesting article on the topic here. [ductus.com]
    • It's an individual thing - I know many friends who're absolute mac/osx nuts, and they loathe anti-aliasing on text in any shape or form.

      For me, I really don't like web browsing without it!. Going to Mozilla before Silk used to feel harsh on my eyes, while returning to omniweb would suddenly make me feel all relaxed :). Use what works!

      a grrl & her server [danamania.com]
      • Are you by chance using a CRT instead of an LCD? I'm wondering how much difference that makes.

        I appreciate the "use whatever you like" notion, but as OS X comes into its own, I'm getting a distinct impression that everyone's going to end up with anti-aliased text, like it or not, without any real discussion of its merits and demerits. That's why I brought it up here.

        As I noted before, I think anti-aliased text is the best choice in many cases: very small text, large text, or screen versions of print-oriented documents (e.g., PDFs, where the alternative is weirdly spaced aliased text).

        But I still think the best thing for doing lots of on-screen reading may be well-hinted, aliased fonts, spaced and pixel-aligned with on-screen reading in mind. That's a pretty tall order, and somewhat kludgy, since it harkens back to the old screen-font/printer-font days -- it isn't "true" typography and doesn't fit that well with WYSIWYG workflow across different devices. So maybe I'll just have to get used to anti-aliasing. I do like the look of it, at least.
    • I think the problem you're talking about has more to do with the fonts chosen by the designer, or your chosen fonts in the application, than a problem with anti-aliasing.

      At smaller sizes (generally below 8 points), a sans-serif font (like Helvetica) will be easier to read, because of the "shaded" or "fuzzy" pixels needed for the serifed font (like Times New Roman) to display smoothly.

      If the serif is smaller than a pixel, or the size is "bewteen" 2 pixels, it needs to add a gray pixel to smooth the serif, thus making it display "fuzzy."

      Since this anti-aliasing feature is new, many pages will not have taken it into account yet, because aliased text might have been easier to read before. This is kind of a "whole new world" for designers to take into account, and I think it's a good thing, because in the long run it will greatly increase legibility.
  • Ironically, I've been going through a lot of trouble to turn off as much anti-aliasing as possible on my TiBook. It may look nice on a big screen, but I keep having to lean in and read twice on quite a few of the fonts, due to the red-and-blue that anti-aliasing seems to create.

    I don't know if this is a problem with me, the screen, or the rendering. The only drawback seems to be that Quartz apps that expect anti-aliasing don't always know when it's turned off and the spacing on proportional fonts sometimes ends up quite strange.

    Still, it's nice to see that the tradition of Small, Useful Mac Plugins continues. It's the enthusiasm of programmers that have kept me far from disappointed in the Macintosh.

    • Re:Anti-Aliasing on TiBook (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Yarn ( 75 )
      I hate to say it, but maybe they should look into licensing ClearType [microsoft.com] From MS.

      Yes, it's MS, but it is designed for LCD displays, whereas it appears that the current system is designed for non-trinitron CRTs.
    • I've had some problems with anti-aliasing on laptops as well. While it looks a hell of alot nicer (browsing the web with Mozilla after using OmniWeb or Chimera is almost painfully ugly) it's much harder to read on my 12" iBook than on my Cube's 17" flat CRT, unless I lean in to it.
    • Normally I wouldn't reply to my own posts, but I thought about this some more and thought it was interesting. Though I have all my anti-aliasing turned off, or as much as I could possibly get away with, the nature of the TiBook's screen still displays fonts with a little bit of blur, effectively making even proportional fonts a little anti-aliased.

      Does anyone know if the new screen on the 800mhz TiBook [apple.com] is any crisper? I surely don't have any complaints about the older TiBook's display except for when reading text.

      I like typing that. "Lookit me, I'm a Macaddict. TiBook, TiBook, TiBook." Thank you.
  • I don't know what Apple did, but anti-aliasing in Quartz is broken: diagonal lines in some fonts are much weaker than they should be. Windows XP's anti-aliasing is a little better, but not quite up-to-snuff either. Even with correctly implemented anti-aliasing, it does not help readability anyway.

    Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.

    • Re:why would you want to? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ZxCv ( 6138 )
      Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.

      Personally, I prefer that it be on by default. Far more things than design and photo editing benefit from it--IE, namely. The text rendering in IE on OS X is just downright horrid compared to some of the other browsers available (Chimera, OmniWeb)--so much so that I had started to use IE less and less as Chimera matured, solely because Chimera looks so much better. After installing Silk, IE looks essentially just as good as Chimera. Now, until Chimera really advances in features and stability, I've got no reason to use it because the text in IE finally looks as good as the rest of OS X.

      • After installing Silk, IE looks essentially just as good as Chimera. Now, until Chimera really advances in features and stability, I've got no reason to use it because the text in IE finally looks as good as the rest of OS X.

        This is just my opinion I suppose, but you should really give Mozilla a spin.

        I haven't tried the haxie, but if it really makes Carbon apps render as beautifully as Chimera (which I also have begun to use more and more as it matures), then basically if you apply it to Mozilla you have a fully stable and mature Chimera. Chimera is still much more lightweight and doesn't have some of the bloat that Mozilla has, but Mozilla has the tabs etc and is just a nice experience.

        Three other things that I do wish Mozilla supported on OS X are the native graphics widgets, dragging URLs into the Dock, and the emacs-style keybindings present in all Cocoa apps. But these are quite minor points.

  • Quartz text rendering  font aliasing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by deleuze ( 199965 ) on Saturday June 08, 2002 @09:17PM (#3666790)
    I wonder why in this whole discussion about anti-aliased fonts in carbon apps or other operating system nobody mentions that quartz text rendering is more than simple anti-aliasing of glyphs (i.e. characters).

    if you render a single glyph not aliased, for readibility reasons you have to place it within the pixel matrix. The effect you get if you'd use some sort of "exact" glyph positioning was possible to see if you switched on the "fractional character width" in old classic applications (AppleWorks has this settings in the text preference); using this "exact" character width as opposed to "character width as necessary to the pixel matrix" gives you strange gaps between letters. the fractional character width gives you the same glyph placement at it would be printed on a high-resolution device like a printer.

    quartz adopts PDF rendering for exactly this reason. it's not anti-aliased single letters but anti-aliased "whole pages".

    i cannot understand the complaints about unreadable anti-aliased text in cocoa-applications. here it's possible to clearly read 6pt text -- as opposed to carbon apps where everything below 9pt is almost unreadable.

    btw in omniweb (in 4.1 beta/sneaky peaks) you can immediatly switch off text smoothing in the fonts & colors preferences dialog. simply set the "Smooth text larger than..." to 255.

    (this remarks should be rewritten by some native speakers)
  • I guess there's a reason why Apple didn't enable this hack in their operating system, and left it up to developers to roll in support. It actually crashes AIM for me, whenever I send or someone else sends me a message. I love the way it makes stuff look, but I can't sacrifice stability for prettyness. I want to actually be able to use my applications, not just look at them. Also, putting AIM in the excluded applications list doesn't work for me.
    • Ack! I know it's lame to respond to my own post, but there's no edit feature here, and I just thought of something. In the current version of AIM, the buddy list is already anti-aliased, but not the message text. Perhaps the fact that some of the front end is in Cocoa and some of it is still Carbon is what is causing it to crash, because now one application is using two IOKit threads plus one CFM. Perhaps this will be fixed in 10.2 with hardware-based rendering.
  • 1. Set you 17" - 19" monitor to 1600x1200.
    2. Install Silk.
    3. Make all your fonts bigger in every one of your apps.

    You'll understand why AA fonts is great all the time.

    X was supposed to - finally - get us out of the bitmap doldrums.. when if you had the res, you'd use it.. but it doesn't.

    The menu bar is the same size for all resolutions.. the icons in the windows and in the Dock don't ootomatically (thanks Steve, between Jagwire and ootomatically, i can't even be understood any more) resize when you change resolutions - which should be low-hanging fruit.

    Damnit - i have at least 1600x1200 dots on my screen, and i plan on using every damn one of them.. there's no reason not to. Not with display PDF.

    Apple needs to get on the ball and make it so that you'll WANT to go to 1600x1200... because then everything should look really really nice..

    making everything unreadable at higher resolutions is the wrong answer - not when i'm supposedly looking at a PDF.

    One app that really shines with Silk - i hate to admit - is Word.

    resize your paper on the Industrial Revolution to full screen, and then select the zoom level to "page width". It is a whole new and bizzare experience..

    it looks like you're typing in a magazine. The words looks so good...

    and since i use Apple Garamond a lot, everything i do looks like a Apple ad now when i type.

    AA is a great idea.. Apple just needs to break the bitmap paradigm and get us out of it once and for all.. they have the tools with Aqua, they just need to execute.
  • For those not interested in installing a haxie (esp. considering that it does seem to have issues with some Carbon apps), Mozilla already has support:
    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149427 [mozilla.org]

    I am running 20020607 right now it and it looks very nice.
  • Thank you santa jobs for giving us users with old boxes something to cheer. supporting hardware acceleration for old ati 2d graphics has given my machine a new lease on life! i'm switching to X for good now! photoshop ran fast and smoooooooothe. . . .

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