Anti aliased text

I'm thinking of reformatting all the text using anti alias
option.
This seems a sensible option, as I assume it makes the text
look smoother.
I like the appearence, but a reasonable number of people,
didn't like it. Some said it made things look marginally blurry.
What are your views. Do many of you use the anti alias
feature. Currently I use Verdana font in my applications.

I agree it's a mix between 'smoother' vs. 'blurry'. With some
fonts, the
'I' can look pretty thin and blurry especially. You may have
better
results with different fonts; so the first thing maybe to try
is a
variety of fonts showing A through Z set to antialias and see
which
looks best.
Colors can matter too.
I think I've found good results with something like black,
bold,
antialiased text on top of backgrounds that aren't too
heavily
contrasted (like maybe yellow instead of white?).
Ensure the font you pick is a common one or you'll have to
install it on
the user's computer.
I generally don't use antialiased fonts though...all depends
how they
look for a given project's design. They also take a bit more
power to
display so might want to avoid them for lower-end machine
specs.
Erik
webacity wrote:
> I'm thinking of reformatting all the text using anti
alias option.
Erik Lord
http://www.capemedia.net
Adobe Community Expert - eLearning
http://www.adobe.com/communities/experts/
http://www.awaretips.net -
Authorware Tips!

Similar Messages

Anti-aliased text when exporting PDF to image

I need to be able to batch-convert multi-page PDFs to individual bitmap images (one image for each page) with anti-aliased text.
Photoshop works this way if you open a single PDF, allowing you to select one or more pages to rasterize as separate images, but not when batch processing (specifically, if you use the Image Processor script on a folder of images and PDFs, it will rasterize the PDFs automatically, but it will only do so with the first page of each PDF.)
Acrobat, on the other hand, automatically creates an image for each page when exporting, and can do this in a batch sequence, but the text is not anti-aliased, making the image look like a screenshot from 1997. No matter how high an image resolution you select, the text is still jagged when you zoom in.
So, is there a setting I'm missing that will allow the text to be anti-aliased when using Acrobat to export PDF to an image? I am using Acrobat 8, not 9, so something might have changed in the newest version.

Not sure about Acrobat Pro 8, but in Acrobat Pro 9 (not Extended) you can Export>Image>Multiple Choice: JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TIFF. I used JPEG and under the options in the export dialog box, leave the filename as is to coincide with the PDF filename and then choose Maximum Resolution under File Settings: Grayscale (JPEG, Quality:Maximum); Color (JPEG, Quality:Maximum) . . . skip down to Conversion Colorspace: Determine Automatically and Resolution choose 600pixels/inch for a letter size document. This will result in a file size of 1.3MB per JPEG image if there is not a lot of information on the page. I chose a simple header, footer with page numbering, and 5 lines of Lorem Ipsum text. 600dpi is overkill, you can go for 300dpi and still result in a decent image that will be able to be printed on a laser photocopier that is connected to a production computer. Obviously if you are printing to a laser printer or a high quality inkjet 300dpi will suffice as well for a letter sized document. But I have been told that 300dpi is not a standard rule of thumb and you must obtain specs from your printer since he/she can calculate by very strict rules the dpi you need for your content. It depends on whether you have background images such as watermarks and also if your text body contains line-art.

LineBreakMeasurer with anti-aliased text

Hello,
I am developing an application, which needs to render anti-aliased text. The application uses LineBreakMeasurer for text layout. Without anti-aliasing, LineBreakMeasurer works perfectly. However, when I turn anti-aliasing on, the text lines returned by LineBreakMeasurer.nextLayout() are too long (that is, longer than the specified wrapping width).
For example, if I call
TextLayout layout = measurer.nextLayout(92.0);
then
layout.getAdvance()
might return 101.0.
Has anybody been able to make LineBreakMeasurer to work with anti-aliased text?
Thanks,
-Tero

My english is not so good, I hope this help to you.
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.font.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.text.*;
public class ParagraphLayout extends JFrame{
public static void main(String[] args) {
    JFrame f = new ParagraphLayout("ParagraphLayout");
    f.getContentPane().add(new Test());
    f.setVisible(true);
public ParagraphLayout(String title) {
    super(title);
    createUI();
protected void createUI() {
    setSize(500, 400);
    center();
    addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
      public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
        dispose();
        System.exit(0);
public void center() {
    Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
    Dimension frameSize = getSize();
    int x = (screenSize.width - frameSize.width) / 2;
    int y = (screenSize.height - frameSize.height) / 2;
    setLocation(x, y);
class Test extends JPanel{
       public Test(){
            super();
      public void update(Graphics g){
           paintComponent(g);
      public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
        g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,
            RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
        // From _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
        String s = "Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Buend\u00eda spent the long months " +
           "of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he " +
           "had built in the rear of the house so that no one " +
           "would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned " +
           "his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the " +
           "courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost " +
           "contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact method " +
           "to ascertain noon. When he became an expert in the use and " +
           "manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of " +
           "space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, " +
           "to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish " +
           "relations with splendid beings without having to leave " +
           "his study. That was the period in which he acquired the habit " +
           "of talking to himself, of walking through the house without " +
           "paying attention to anyone...";
        Font font = new Font("Serif", Font.PLAIN, 24);
        AttributedString as = new AttributedString(s);
        as.addAttribute(TextAttribute.FONT, font);
        AttributedCharacterIterator aci = as.getIterator();
        FontRenderContext frc = g2.getFontRenderContext();
        LineBreakMeasurer lbm = new LineBreakMeasurer(aci, frc);
        Insets insets = getInsets();
        float wrappingWidth = getSize().width - insets.left - insets.right;
        float x = insets.left;
        float y = insets.top;
        while (lbm.getPosition() < aci.getEndIndex()) {
          TextLayout textLayout = lbm.nextLayout(wrappingWidth);
          y += textLayout.getAscent();
          textLayout.draw(g2, x, y);
          y += textLayout.getDescent() + textLayout.getLeading();
          x = insets.left;
}

CS5 bug rendering anti-aliased text in 'Save for web'

Seems like there's a bit of a bug when using 'Save for web and devices' with thin weights of type in CS5 for Mac. Although thin type looks fine while working in Illustrator, as soon as you enter the 'Save for web' dialogue, it gets badly mangled. Looks like this issue has been present at least since CS4. It does not happen in Photoshop. It looks particularly bad for light text on a dark background.
Some people may say "sure, Illustrator is not really meant for intensive bitmap work". However, with features like 'pixel preview' and 'snap to pixel', Illustrator has (generally) become a very viable tool for web design, and personally I much prefer it to Photoshop. It is also clear that Adobe intends it to be usable in this manner. So the anti-aliasing render bug is definitely a problem. Just surprised they didn't address it when CS5 was born.
I put up some example images on http://www.thesheep.co.uk/2011/06/24/illustrator-save-for-web-anti-aliasing-problems/ to illustrate the problem.
Does anyone have any clever work-arounds for this? It's a bit annoying to have to move stuff over to PS before exporting, but maybe that's what I have to do. Hopefully Adobe will address this soon.

Hi,
I am experiencing this same problem of pixelated gifs when I use the "save for web" dialog from Illustrator, but this solution has not worked for me. I have tried the trick of using type-optimized anti-aliasing, but it doesn't change the output at all. I've done this from within the "Image size" tab as well as through Effect>Rasterize>Options)Anti-aliasing: Type Optimized. My image is a logo made entirely from text, although for some of it I used "outline path", so I'm not sure if it still qualifies as text...I'm a newbie at this stuff, so the technical details are still quite opaque to me.
Does anyone know of a solution to this that does not require me to add Photoshop to my workflow?
I'm using Illustrator in CS5, version 15.0.2.
Thanks in advance
Jonathan

How can I get anti-aliased text?

I create my bitmap and Graphics2D object as follows:
BufferedImage img = new BufferedImage(devExtX, devExtY, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
graphic = (Graphics2D) img.getGraphics();
graphic.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
graphic.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_FRACTIONALMETRICS, RenderingHints.VALUE_FRACTIONALMETRICS_ON);
graphic.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
graphic.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_RENDERING, RenderingHints.VALUE_RENDER_QUALITY);
But text is drawn with no anti-aliasing (does that mean it is aliased <g>?).
Any ideas what I am missing?
thanks - dave

Hi George,
STXL: Long Text (Header - English)
Extract all records where XTDOBJECT='AUFK' and XTDID='KOPF' and XTDSPRAS in ('E')
XTDNAME is MANDT+AUFNR
STXL: Long Text (Operations- English)
Extract all records where XTDOBJECT='AUFK' and XTDID='AVOT' and XTDSPRAS in ('E')
XTDNAME is MANDTAUFPLAPLZL
STXL: Long Text (Components- English)
Extract all records where XTDOBJECT='AUFK' and XTDID='MATK' and XTDSPRAS in ('E')
XTDNAME is MANDTRSNUMRSPOS
This may help you
Babu

Preview - anti aliasing and text in scanned pdf

hello all,
i have an issue with preview not anti aliasing text in pdf files. to elaborate, take a pdf with text which is selectable and it appears jagged, not anti aliased as in pdfs with text which is treated as an image, i.e. not selectable.
also, sometimes, when scrolling through pages in full screen, the following page has the text anti-aliased as the scroll animation is taking place, i.e. while the previous page is being moved away through the gesture, but once the previous page has disappeared and the new page 'settled in' the smoothing is gone.
smooth text and line art is checked, as is lcd smoothing in general preferences.
any suggestion are much appreciated.
s.

Hi 1ndivisible,
Hmm, that's odd. My type is looking pretty decent out of Illustrator. Can you try a different font or the same font in a new sequence?
Thanks,
Kevin

Flash 9 Text Not Properly Anti-Aliased In Flash 10

I use Flash CS3 to author .swfs for Flash Player 9. recently
i noticed that Flash 10 is not displaying the anti-aliased text
from Flash 9 content correctly.
See image (link:
http://i717.photobucket.com/albums/ww175/chunk1978/Picture3.png
). The above image is Flash 9 text playing in Flash 10. The bottom
image is Flash 9 text playing in Flash 9. The removal of the fine
coloring makes the text much sharper looking. It's not ideal,
especially for smaller text of size 10 and below.
Is there anyway i can create a Flash 10 file using Flash CS3?
I've tried using the trial version of Flash CS4 to do this,
but it really doesn't play nicely with my current CS3 project. LOTS
of "missing fonts" as well as the working stage not rendering
correctly in the program. I'd rather avoid CS4 all together as it
seems littered with issues, and i'm in no position to start from
scratch.
any help would be very appreciated.

Have you checked the font?
Are they the same fonts in Word and Pages?
Some applications maintain their own font folders.
There is also a possibility of font clashes, a problem with OSX having dfonts, ttf and sometimes otf fonts all with the same name. OSX is a bit of a mess with font management (as well as color management).
Peter

AS window in leopard shows anti aliased font. Fix?

I was using CS3 no problem, but when I upgraded to leopard on
my mac, the cs3 actionscript window shows all anti aliased text.
The standard text in morocco 10, which it is set to. I know that I
can go into preferences in leopard and change the aliaseing to be
turned off for 10 and bellow, but then most things are aliased.
This problem didn't exist earlier.
So is there a setting or something in Flash that I can set to
make sure that the actionscript window keeps text aliased? I really
don't want smooth text in my as window. Any help would be great.
Cheers.
-i

i already do have anti-aliasing turned on. black text on a white background is anti-aliased as expected. i'm trying to use white on black and the difference, while subtle, is there. since i sit in front of a terminal and program all day, i want a font and display combination that is easier on my eyes than what i'm seeing now. i'll go back to black text on light background for now, but in the long run i prefer the opposite style.
iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7)

No anti-aliasing?

I have read that the Text Engine introduced with Flash Player 10 is supposed to provide anti-aliasing for devide fonts (i.e. non-embedded fonts). This is essential for Web applications: without anti-aliasing text looks awful and Flex applications cannot compete with HTML applications. But fonts that include East-Asian characters cannot be embedded because they take up too much space. And I don't see how a Web application in 2009 can fail to support East-Asian characters.
Today I tried Flash Builder 4, and created 3 Spark components, of types RichEditableText, RichText, and SimpleText, without embedding any fonts. All three could be rotated, which I believe means they use the new Text Engine. But none of them had anti-aliasing (which I checked by looking at how they rendered capital letter W). Why is this? Do I have to do something special to get anti-aliasing? Or is anti-aliaing a feature that will be coming later?
Thanks in advance,
Francisco

Hi Corey,
Thanks for your message. I've looked more carefully at the device font I'm using on the Mac (with an LCD display). You are right, it's anti-aliased. (I can't see any subpixel colorations with my magnifying glass as I can see them on Windows, but maybe they are just less obvious.)
So the reason the device font looks ugly on the Mac must just be the letter spacing. Since you said it looks good to you, I checked the code and did some experimentation. It turns out that I'm saying fontFamily="_sans" and, surprisingly, in Flex 3, this it not the same as not assigning a value to fontFamily. (Out of curiosity I checked Flex 4, and it is the same there.) Saying fontFamily="_sans" causes the letter spacing to be way off. If I don't say anything the spacing it still a bit off, but not too much, and the font does not look bad, although it still does not look as good as an embedded font.
I tried taking screen shots, but they come out a little blurry and it's hard to judge fonts on them. But I'm attaching a simple mxml file that compares the embedded font, the device font with no assignment to fontFamily, and the device font with fontFamily="_sans".
If you want to see the huge difference that fonts make on the application, the best thing is to look at the application itself, so I should say what it is. It's Noflail Search, a search engine that you can find at noflail.com. It starts out using an embedded font, but if it encounters an East-Asian character, or you specifiy an East-Asian language restriction, or you turn on an IME for an East-Asian language, it switches to fontFamily="_sans" (and lets you know that it does). To go back to the embedded font you can remove what caused the switch and reload the page. So it's easy to compare the effect of the two fonts.
The switching to the device font was my clumsy attempt at coping with the East-Asian character problem. Unfortunately the switching happens fairly often, because East-Asian characters pop-up in results when you least expect it, even if the query has nothing to do with East-Asia. So I will remove the "feature" soon, and just use device fonts and hope that most Windows users have ClearType enabled. But I'll leave it on all day Monday in case you want to check out the effect of the fonts on the application.
When I said that Adobe should not rely on embedded fonts I was referring to the fact that the nice anti-aliasing and text rendering that you have in Flex 3, and the presumably nicer one in Flex 4, is only available for embedded fonts.
Btw I've been comparing the subpixel anti-aliasing that I get with ClearType and a device font on Windows to the embedded font, and the embedded font looks definitely better. The device font with ClearType looks purplish, and the anti-aliasing does not seem as good. So let me emphasize that I'm not arguing that Adobe should use subpixel anti-aliasing. I'm arguing that the grey-scale anti-aliasing and text rendering that you use for embedded fonts should be used for device fonts as well. Is there any technical reason that makes this difficult? Impossible?
Thanks for listening
Francisco

Paths being anti-aliased

Hello,
I've got a project with a lot of artwork in paths. It was created in illustrator run through catalyst. The artwork was all fine until I added some RichText on the screen next to the art in Flash Builder. Now the art is all anti-aliasing making the fine lines look very fuzzy. Can anyone tell me how to turn anti-aliasing off for the entire project? I've confirmed that its the RichText that is doing it because if I comment it out it goes back to aliased lines in all the paths.
Thanks for any help,
Paul

Check out the section "Anti-Aliased Text' toward the bottom of this article:
Intermediate Images
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Media/intimages/

Photoshop CC Text Anti-aliasing problem.

Hey guys, not sure if anyone else has experienced this problem, but today I turned on my machine and starting layout out some type and noticed that it looked alot chunkier than before. I had my anti-aliasing set to Mac LCD, which is usually spot on, but this particular text field looked terrible. I opened an old document and sure enough, I was right, the same type of anti-aliasing looked vastly different, even when both of the typfaces were exactly the same. I've had others open the file on their machines and have gotten the same problem. Now every time I create a new text field, I get chunky, terrible looking anti-aliasing, no matter what font I'm using. The only way I can get good looking type is by copying and pasting from old files. I've included an example file of what I mean. On the left is Trade Gothic, and on the right is Trajan (just to show it's not any particular font). The top versions of the fonts look beautiful clean, and anti-aliased properly. The bottom versions look chunky and blurry. Any help would be much appreciated!
Download the file here: http://cl.ly/3I2L2f163q3z

Same problem here.
This fixed it for me. Though, only temporarily:
1. Select all layers of your PSD file.
2. Select the type drop down > Anti-Aliasing > None
3. Save your file
4. Quit Photoshop
5. Re-open the file
6. Select all layers of your PSD again
7. Select the type drop down > Mac LCD (or desired aliasing)
8. Save the file
9. Continue working
This worked the last few times I tried but it is not a permanent solution.
I feel your pain

Possible bug in Illustrator CS4 text anti-aliasing in Save for Web and Devices

Hello all,
This could be a bug... if so, I'd be happy to add it to Wade's bug list a few messages down the stream.
Here's what's happening: when I create small text using a very thin font (in this case, Helvetica Neue Light), the Pixel Preview gives a noticeably different anti-aliasing solution to the actual output from Save for Web & Devices. I'm attaching an original .AI file as well as a screenshots of what I'm getting in both situations.
I'd really prefer the Save for Web and Devices output to look exactly like the Pixel Preview. The font looks great in Illustrator but loses a lot of its punch when I Save for Web.
---Peter

In the Svae for Web and Device under the image tab where it says art Optimize that is a drop down menu select Type Optimize as such
htis is what it lloks like in AI and a browser when you choose Type Optimize
This the difference between Art Optimized and Type Optimize
That is what is happening to you you are selcting Art Optimize and that is the reason when you choose art optimize aqnd you rraster the image it looks right to you.

Anti-aliased HTML text in Webkit browser?

Hi all,
I'm working with the webkit browser in an AIR project and running into a big hurdle. The fonts displayed in my webkit HTML are blocky and jaggy due to AIR not supporting -webkit-font-smoothing or text-rendering, and this is making my really great AIR app look a bit shoddy.
I was just wondering if anyone out there might have some sort of solution (or hack) that would resolve this issue and improve the appearance of the HTML text. Is there anything I can do?
Thanks for any advice,
Steven.

Hi Chris,
Thanks for your reply. I'm using Flash CS6 targetting Air 3.4 for Desktop (on Win7). I tried switching my app to using StageWebView as suggested but it yields the same results, and so am a bit stumped as to what to do. I've checked my html css to make sure the correct font styling is in place and it appears smooth and anti-aliased in Chrome and IE (but not Firefox), so I'm not entirely sure what to do now.
I'm not too big into Webkit but is there anything in particular I should look out for with my machine?
Thanks again,
Steven.

Text isn't anti-aliased in packaged file

My text is anti-aliased in my AW piece, but not in my
published .exe file. Anyone know why?

You may have better luck getting help if you post to the Pages discussion forum.

Is it possible to turn off text smoothing (Anti-Aliasing)?

Hi,
this Anti-Aliasing or I think it is called text smoothing in English is really ugly and is driving me nuts. I cant turn it off. Even with TinkerTool up to size 144 it just doesnt help. Especially Safari loks horrible. Can it be turned off? Does anyone know if Leopard will be able to turn it off?
Cheers
Axel

Have you set font smoothing in Appearances (System preferences) to match your monitor?

Anti aliased text

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