Looks like they’re using ’regular’ antialaising, maybe with some clever filters - that’s a bit 1997 isn’t it? ;-) Everyone else - Macromedia, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft abandoned that a while ago.

Weird, why does the alleged 1997 look better than Adobe’s or Microsoft’s font rendering.
It’s not about how accurate each nibble of a glyph is reproduced when viewed at an 80% view but how pleasing it is to the eye.

With ClearType and CoolType I never fail to get an upset stomach when trying to read longer passages of text. Another reason why I got rid of the final Windows XP laptop here.

Just realized that it looks a lot like ATSUI text rendering. I set that up at my main machine to grayscale anti-aliasing as opposed to the rainbow-bride version.

Interesting that you like that anti-aliasing better. The outlines are much more crisp, but the edge of, say, the large lowercase e looks very oddly angular and not as round as I know Warnock Pro is. But “de gustibus non disputandum est,” as they say.

With regards to FontBook integration, I suspect the answer for both may be the same - “why would we support a proprietary single-platform technology? We want to be able to get the same results on both major platforms.” Certainly that would be my initial thought if somebody brought up the question internally. (BTW, why are you only angry at Adobe and not Quark on this point? Are your expectaions inherently lower for Quark or something?)

The only ray of light of it’s interface is the multi pane window allowing for viewing master pages and their impact on the actual document pages, or multiple levels of zoom for your current page.

That’s a fine feature. InDesign has had it for a while - not sure if it was new in CS2 last year, or how far back it goes. Just go to Window > Arrange > New Window.

Cheers,

T

Haven’t we all come to expect less from Quark? :^P

I know I have.

“Lowered Expectations” is my dating agency for Quark ;)

I’m angry about Adobe because I actually ditched Quark for InDesign.

To your comment “why would we support a proprietary single-platform technology?” Easy answer: So you don’t stand out at the prime idiots on that platform. Every developer should live to the best they can on a platform, your comment would tell me that Adobe’s a lazy company - maybe not that bad, but close.

I mean do you really wear snow-boarding attire when going to surf?

The cascading windows feature of InDesign is more annoying than useful. I find the splitting of a window is nicer to the user as it cuts clutter and saves a few clicks.

Ok. I will ask a question and all myself to be laughed at.

About the image Frank posted. If I were doing a lot of online reading I’d say this image looks great. I have times when my eyes refuse to continue reading because the type seems blurry to me. Isn’t there a middle ground?

The best but very expensive approach would have been a Photofont with a custom size for each integer step from 5px to 72px. - Yeah right!

But if I was able to create an anti aliasing method in pixen (almost pixel by pixel) in 2 weeks to make Photofonts look great on screen, the smart heads as Apple, Adobe and Microsoft should be able too. Why they don’t join forces in this is beyond me. Probably a pissing contest.

Thing is that it’s not easy to do that for ALL fonts and currently the only ’global’ anti aliasing method that really works is ATSUI and even that I’d consider as the lesser evil, we’re not there yet. I should add that I read about 98% of my content on-screen. PDFs with Preview.app because Acrobat hurts my eyes.

You really like this? It’s just generic grayscale rendering, 1/4 pixel quantization on subpixel positioning, baseline integer aligned, no hinting, no gamma.

So at the small text sizes, you have some crisp and some fuzzy vertical stems, more or less randomly distributed. Most so-called advanced rendering techniques try pretty hard to at least get the vertical stems consistently sharp.

Of course, plain and simple isn’t always bad. The fancier techniques can indeed introduce visually displeasing effects. Could you post a comparable screenshot from CS2? My guess is that you simply dislike the color fringing from LCD subpixelling technology.

Yes Raph I do like it. It’s easy on the eyes and that’s what counts for me. There is such a thing as “too sharp”.

Can’t compare it to ancient CRT displays if you mean that. I do like stuff that doesn’t wear my eyes out. On my eyes and ears I’m harsh to “intruders” as I only sport one pair of each.

Didn’t care to update to CS2 - not paying €1K for little more than a bugfix release. Currently looking for alternative apps to replace my CS suite, something that’s faster, more stable and lets me work with deeper images (if I hate one thing more than fringed type it’s banded color-transitions).

FYI: Here is a one-to-one comparison using 12pt. Minion Pro (125% view):

InDesignCS:

InDesignCS2:

QuarkXPress 7:

Pages:

OK, Mark’s provided all the evidence I need to feel like Quark 7’s kicking InDesign CS2’s patootie. At least on one front.

It’s about time they caught on.

—Michael.

———————————————————————————
// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
http://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
———————

The Quark and Pages samples look very similar to me which leads me to believe that Quark is using the built-in OS X anti-aliasing. Adobe, of course, uses it’s own thing. One of the things I wanted to show was how much better CS2 anti-aliasing is over CS1. The difference between CS2 and Quark/Pages is less dramatic but noticeable.

I analyzed these, and here are my results.

The Quark and Pages renderings are technically identical. The histogram of grayscales matches the native Quartz renderer, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between, say, ATSUI and CGContextShowText.

CS2 looks like an updated version of the same renderer used for Type1 fonts in Acrobat 5 for Linux (you can see samples of that, as well as some others, here). The histogram shows 16 peaks, suggesting a bitmap rendering at 4x the screen resolution, followed by a downsampling and a gamma of approximately 1.25. Since the rendering is darker than that of the Quartz renderer, I suspect that there is some thickening going on, either by using the any-part-of-pixel rule when drawing the 4x bitmap, or when hints are applied. Most characters have two instances, and you’ll notice that typically either the left or right edge of a vertical stroke is aligned with the pixel grid. The result is slightly more consistent contrast on vertical strokes, but with only two subpixel instances to choose from, spacing is going to be a bit uneven.

CS1 is a botch of some kind. It looks like running TrueType hinter and then applying subpixel offsets to try to even out the spacing. Why CS1 looks like TrueType and CS2 looks like Type1 is something of a mystery. Maybe there’s some font substitution going on (the CS1 rendering is so distorted it’s not easy to rule that out), or perhaps Adobe has ported their core rendering engine across both formats since the last time I looked at it carefully.

In any case, although Quark 7 kicks CS1’s butt in the font rendering, I think it’s only fair to compare it to CS2, in which case the difference is more a matter of personal taste. CS2’s is a little more contrasty, but Quark/Pages definitely has smoother spacing.

Just for fun, I made a sample in FontFocus.

Better? Worse? None of this will matter when we all get our 200dpi displays.

Of the four examples Mark shows, the CS2 looks the best to me.

James

It looks sharper and lighter, but it looks a bit uneven in comparison. It could be that the higher contrast makes it easier to notice when it jumps from 1 to 2 pixels or something.

Frank - it you switch to OSX’s ClearType-like mode does XPress 7 change too?

Cheers, Si

It’s on on my computer, but I notice that it is suppressed sometimes in graphics programs as you can see in the Quark and Pages samples. For example, the sub-pixel anti-aliasing is used in the UI text, but not in the text in the layout window.

I also wonder what effect the Font Smoothing settings in Mac OS X’s System Preferences/Appearance might have on the output.

I have mine set “Medium - best for Flat Panel” which kicks in the ClearType-like mode.

Some apps, esp graphic apps, will ignore users settings and ask the OS for a specific rendering - that’s likely what XPress 7 is doing. Other apps have their own font renderer and in my experience these tend to ignore the user’s OS preferences and do their own thing or expose options in their own settigns menu.

Si - Can’t test it anymore, like any app with a bad interface I deleted it meanwhile.

Quark rendering may seem ’easy on the eyes’ when you look at a block of text, because it has a uniform greyness. But is there is one thing on which legibility experts agree — and it may be the only thing —, it is that high contrast is the key to sustained readability. Put quite simply, there is a reason why books are printed in black ink not mid-grey ink, and a good reason why every single literate culture in the world has developed black pigments for use as the standard colour for text.

Personally, I don’t think any of the rendering examples shown in this thread are even close to good enough for continuous onscreen reading. But then they’re not really supposed to be (with the exception of Raph’s FontFocus example?): they’re preview text for page layout applications, and their purpose is to provide an image of the text in the context of layout. Given this goal, the best way to judge the type rendering is set beside the same applications’ handling of image previews. When you look at a page of mixed text and image in a layout app, what matters most is that you have an accurate relative relationship, so you can make judgements about the whole design.

For the sake of comparison, here is the same setting in ClearType with a quickly made TT version of Minion Pro. This is with FontLab autohinting, hence the problem with the collapsing dot above the i. This is ClearType rendering post-XP, with sub-pixel positioning. If your screen resolution is less than 145dpi this will look pretty large, and coloyr artifacts will be more noticeable than they are here. But then all the other examples look tiny on my screen (closer to 9pt than 12pt zoomed to 125%!).

And to complete the comparison, here is a zoom of the CT rendering in glorious technicolour. Note the consistent high contrast. This is beginning to look like text, not a picture of text.

Thanx for the retinal burn!

To your earlier comment about Layout vs. Reading. Sometimes you have to read the text your setting. When using InDesign I usually export a PDF and open that in Preview to proof-read it.

BTW, Is there a secret control panel where I can change CoolType to ATSUI in Adobe Reader and InDesign?

No, the only rendering available in Adobe Reader and InDesign is done by CoolType.

You can however turn on the LCD-enhanced mode (confusingly mislabeled “CoolType”) in Adobe Reader if you like.

Cheers,

T

That’s really limiting. Marketing reasons?

on a not totally unrelated note -+- any news on CS3? The apps were always slow and hungry, but on the Intel Macs it’s just a joke.

Better? Worse? None of this will matter when we all get our 200dpi displays.

If the questions aren’t rhetorical, I’d say FontFocus makes Minion look like Times New Roman. Somehow.

Glad to hear that Adobe’s finally on Xcode and gets help from Apple converting to Intel based Macs by September. Hope the suite gets a complete re-write, given the excessively long time span since the first kits were sent to developers this seems very likely.

My general mini wish-list

• Make the apps more stable
  • Photoshop is a pain with images larger 500MB
  • Illustrator won’t accept images pasted that don’t come from Photoshop (how embarrassing)
  • InDesign crashes when attempting a spellcheck (not just at my machines)
• Let ME choose how I want to read MY text. I’m the user, I paid YOU not vice versa. If YOU pay ME for using your apps we can talk about it.
• All apps have to be faster, the current speed is not acceptable.
• A bathing suit for water and a thick jacket for ice. Make the apps their best on their native environment. How? Hire people, you’re not charging the ridiculous prices for nothing.
• Leveraging platforms also enables a sane font menu and the use of CoreImage on the Mac and whatever they got on Windows.

Wonder if Adobe’s still the arrogant company they used to be or if we’re going to see some changes for the better. Looking forward 10 years and considering how more and more people work, their tech understanding and what they’re willing to put up with the picture isn’t very bright with the current mindset of this company.

Frank Jonen, your last comments are off topic and generally out-of-scope as far as Typophile discussion is concerned. If you are upset that Photoshop can’t handle 500MB files, this is really the last place you should report your complaints to...

Since Frank started the thread and anything goes in General Discussions, your comment doesn’t really seem fair.
Tim

Frank isn’t saying anything that hasn’t already been said in the Forums on Adobe’s site.

Okay Tiffany, you’re right. That’s why we have the different categories.
:0) Adobe Forums are probably a better place for this line of discussion though...

If Adobe would read their forums people wouldn’t post these lists all over the place. Apologies to canderson for speaking openly.

Roses are red, Violets are blue, Poinsettias are poisonous, And hard to read through.

Welcome, Frank, to “the 2%” MS claims are not be able to “see” the emperors new fonts. Minion pro is (was) an oldstyle face isn’t it? Not a modern...

“Better? Worse? None of this will matter when we all get our 200dpi displays.”
I love this fantasy. First of all you want 144-5, or 216-8. Second of all, you can be sure that 216 dpi will bring a new definition to “small screen fonts”, down from 10-12 pt., to 6-9 pt. Third, you’re talking about when ALL SCREENS, from phones and ipods, to work stations are 2-3 pixels-per-point, and that’ll be the day...

“Let ME choose how I want to read MY text. I’m the user, I paid YOU not vice versa. If YOU pay ME for using your apps we can talk about it.”

Shame on you. Who do you think you are!? Choices like this are for people in “highest common denominator” environments, and you work in “lowest common denominatorville.”

I think I’m a person that paid another person to get a product. If that product is crap I say so openly and encourage others to do the same.

So I need special fonts to make my content not look like crap on Windows, is that what you mean essentially? Interesting.