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It's been said that experience is the best teacher. While working on this sub-pixel font rendering project this was certainly the case for me. The theory of how this should be done was instantly clear especially since we'd seen it all before (see The True Origins of these Ideas). But the color fringing problem (see Turning Theory into Practice) which turns out to have been understood and solved by many others a long time (many years) ago was new to me and presented some unexpected fun! You will find that Free&Clear is extremely easy to use and follows the common "wizard" model with "Back" and "Next" buttons to guide you at your own pace. Its effective use requires absolutely no understanding of the theory of sub-pixel font rendering. However, if you're interested in playing with the advanced "tuning" controls to alter the relative percentages of sub-pixel energy distribution (okay, yes, we do have rocket science here) you'll probably want to study the Implementation Details page first in order to get the most out of that aspect of Free&Clear. I also incorporated extensive pop-up help into the program's scant 35k bytes, so clicking over any control with the mouse's right button will immediately present you with an explanation of that control's purpose and operation.
there are some things I can say along the lines of "getting the most out of it" . . .
![]() The Text panel is selected when the "Text" button is depressed in the upper right corner of the window. Many of the controls here are reminiscent of any word processor since that's essentially what I created.
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As is explained on the Implementation Details page, the secret to "getting the red out" of sub-pixel rendered text is to employ age-old anti-aliasing techniques ... but updated with color in order to take advantage of the sub-pixel color positional nature of LCD panels. The enlargement of the word "Evolution" shown above demonstrates the result of this colorized anti-aliasing. (And, by the way, try experimenting with the "Render Mode" buttons while zoomed in like this!)
I hope you'll enjoy using Free&Clear to learn about and experiment with the technology of sub-pixel graphics and font rendering.
Since this will definitely not be the end of my own exploration into this technology (hint hint! In the meantime, here are some other places to explore . . . |
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Last Edit: May 28, 2010 at 13:33 (5,370.53 days ago) | Viewed 6 times per day |