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May 15th, 2005

Antialiased fonts, Subversion and normals

I never quite understood why Windows’ fonts would be anti-aliased only at large sizes. It doesnt take much to do some basic anti-aliasing. Render a character at double the size, shrink it to the required size with an average filtering, and there is the smooth looking character. In any case, recently I’ve seen several screen shots on the web, where Windows XP’s fonts looked pretty smooth. Eventually I did a web search and I found out that the ClearType font rendering, was actually available on XP, not just on Pocket PC (Windows for PDAs). I downloaded the ClearType PowerToy and after a short while I was already looking at anti-aliased fonts.
ClearType does some extra clever smoothing for LCD monitors, where red green and blue sub-pixels are nicely distributed each taking exactly one third of a whole pixel.
This is not a new thing. Adobe Acrobat Reader has been doing it, Apple MacOS X on LCD displays has also been doing it. Microsoft of course claims some special recipe that apparently gives it the top quality. I’m not sure where the top quality level is, but I’m definitely much happier now !

Changing topic, I’ve successfully installed and started the Subversion server on my home-server. Now I can work on code at work and find the same changes at home and vice versa. Very handy, although the available GUI clients on Windows aren’t as good as WinCVS for CVS. Still, I’m quite happy.
It seems that nowadays one couldn’t live anymore without Open Source software !!

On the 3D side, I’ve been looking for 3D objects on the net, but everyone wants people to pay for any half decent object (..so much for the Open Source efforts !). So, I asked help to my sister. She sent me a 3DS of a church that either she or her boyfriend made… her architecture studies are starting to become more and more useful from my point of view 8)
Unfortunately my 3DS parser seems to have problems detecting the proper face orientation. Now I’m in the middle of some fierce debugging. I hope to be done with this by today, or I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to grant me a good night of sleep… ummmm !

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2005 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Antialiased fonts, Subversion and normals”

  1. ragin' lion says:

    Mr. Kaz, did you take a look at TortoiseSVN? It’s a really nice Windows frontend client to SVN.

    If you find a link with good 3D models, let me know! I’ve been searching myself. Though I’ve actually been looking for good 3D models with animation data. 8P

    May 16th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
  2. Davide Pasca says:

    I’m using TortoiseSVN.. it’s pretty good. Still I like better WinCVS. I’m messing the options to see the whole repository in one window in flat mode, and with various kind of filters.

    As for the 3D models. I remember you had luck looking at Japanese sites.. mostly giving LWO objects. And that’s as far as my luck went too 8)
    There are ways to rip models out of DOAX, but it’s not very straightforward.

    May 17th, 2005 at 2:14 am
  3. Rasty says:

    I remember I also had a hard time looking for (free) objects on the net while experimenting with Blender.. and ultimately failed! :(

    May 17th, 2005 at 3:22 am
  4. ragin' lion says:

    There are a lot of LWO ones. The best I’ve found are the MQO data. It was a slight pain writing a converter (which I still need to finish up), but it’s much better than nothing.

    If you’re searching for the data at work, be careful. Some of the links are 大人 in nature.

    May 17th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
  5. Davide Pasca says:

    Lots of nice 3D chicks models !!!
    Very interesting, although not a good excuse for trying radiosity algorithms 8)

    May 18th, 2005 at 12:40 am
  6. ragin' lion says:

    Yeah … too many female models. I wish there were more of dragons and other type of fantasy creatures. My guess is that (perhaps) those who are making the female models are otaku given some of the search results I’ve seen.

    May 20th, 2005 at 11:34 am

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