Re: black
Re: black
- Subject: Re: black
- From: Stefan Werner <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 14:42:52 -0800
Hi,
Am I the only person who misses the color black?
Puh, what a relief. I thought I was the only one who had that problem.
I have been trying to figure out why the screen of my G4 powerbook
is so
much more readable when it is in System 9 than in System 10. Then I
started
playing around with DigitalColor Meter. It turns out that OSX
rarely, if
ever, actually displays black-on-white text.
Did you ever compare Carbon apps to Cocoa apps on OS X? Quickdraw
and Quartz seem to have completely different methods for rendering
fonts, you can easily verify that by using the same font (e.g.
Andale Mono) in a Carbon text editor and in a Cocoa editor (e.g.
BBEdit and ProjectBuilder). Using the same font size (in points) in
both applications even results in different sizes on the screen (in
pixels)!
My impression is that Carbon seems to respect font hinting and
tries to use black whenever possible, using shades of gray only on
corners. Cocoa however seems to render the font in big sizes and
then scales it to the target size - I can't verify that, but someone
told me that'd be the way it works and it seems to make sense. I can
understand that the way Cocoa works delivers a much better WYSISYG
than Carbon or font hinting in general does; But when working on
non-print text (which I suppose is thanks to www, email etc the vast
majority of text being used on computers nowadays), respecting font
hinting is essential.
One of the results of this is that I find it much easier to do my
writing on
my Windows XP computer than my OSX computer, because the XP
computer still
has black-on-white type, and not grey-on-white type (although you
can make
it grey-on-white by asking for Microsoft's "Clear Type" which is
almost as
bad as OSX's built-in anti-aliased fonts.)
ClearType is a different thing; I don't use Windows XP at the
moment, but from what I know Windows does some anti aliasing even
when ClearType is turned off. ClearType is AFAIK the name for
Microsoft's subpixel hinting technology, which makes only sense on
LCD displays (although I know people who use it on CRTs as well).
I'd be happy if there was an option for subpixel hinting in OS X,
because I like the way XFree86 uses it to smooth fonts on my iBook.
Regards,
Stefan
PS: If you want to see a real surprise, look at "Lucida Grande 13"
in a Carbon application - hard to believe that it's the same font as
the OS X menu bar uses, right?