

First subpixel typeface, ever - robin_reala
http://typophile.com/node/61920

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andreyf
_You must not look too closely, because colors get visible_

That happens with any anti-aliasing. After using a Mac for some time, what
bothers me about ClearType to no end is that for some fonts, the colors are
painfully visible _without_ looking closely. Without exaggeration, it looks
like shit smeared on the text.

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sp332
Color is only visible in sub-pixel antialiasing. Regular AA, or AA designed
for something other than LCD output, is just shades of gray.

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ajross
And in any case sub-pixel color artifacts were a fact of life for decades when
we were all using CRTs. I don't remember anyone complaining about all those
visible phosphors then.

Regardless: am I the only one who doesn't see much value here? The icons
earlier were arguably more readable, but the colors are nonetheless a little
distracting. And I have a strong suspicion from comments (some very positive,
some like me much less impressed) that these images are being tuned very
heavily to a particular LCD design, or pixel pitch, and aren't as generically
useful as people think.

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URSpider94
This font should work fine on any standard LCD, as long as the OS is not
trying to apply any other kind of sharpening or AA overtop of it. However, it
will only work correctly if it's rendered 1:1 at the resolution of the monitor
-- it can't be scaled at all, so the final size will be dependent on the ppi
of your display.

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ryanwaggoner
It might not be the first, and it might not be terribly useful, but it is
interesting.

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pmichaud
It's actually quite useful for a variety of purposes. One example is favicons
which could contain text in this face.

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roc
If you're putting text in a favicon you're doing it wrong.

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coderdude
Look up

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stevedewald
Lots of brands have been putting text or characters in favicons-- Facebook,
Twitter, and Y-Combinator, to name a few. I think it makes the brand more
recognizable.

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rbanffy
What if my monitor gets rotated?

Sub-pixel anti-aliasing belongs to the low-level font renderer, the part that
knows how the sub-pixels are arranged in the current canvas.

Just blindly assuming a given arrangement is neither particularly clever nor
future-proof. It's not even present-proof (I use a notebook attached to a
rotated LCD display at work and a netbook attached to a big CRT at home) as
many displays are designed to rotate (thus changing the sub-pixel
arrangement).

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zandorg
I once wrote a 3x3 pixel bitmap (just 1-colour pixels) font on my ZX Spectrum
in Art Studio! The main problem was the S - it had to have a diagonal.

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endergen
Note: This I believe only works on LCD based displays. Which is still very
useful.

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spydez
It only works on LCD based displays where the subpixel layout is RGB. Some old
ones are GBR.

Also won't work if your monitor is flipped sideways.

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jacquesm
And many mobiles, which is one of the few places where this font could
potentially shine.

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kevbin
The font from Screenwriter ]['s 70-column mode in hgr2 for non-80 column Apple
][s may qualify as the first subpixel typeface.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=zBIvBTsHbtUC&lpg=PA118&...](http://books.google.com/books?id=zBIvBTsHbtUC&lpg=PA118&ots=D3RsC1m0Kj&pg=PA118#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

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thristian
How so? The Apple's high-res graphics mode was 280 pixels wide, the standard
ROM font drew characters 7 pixels wide to achieve 40 characters per line; it
sounds like ScreenWriter II drew characters 4 pixels wide to achieve 70
characters per line (a bit cramped, especially for M and W, but doable). What
is 'subpixel' about that?

~~~
kevbin
It's not _really_ 280 pixels wide: there are 280 addressable pixels but
changing one can affect another nearby. Drawing diagonal, intersecting lines
can make your blue lines green or whatever. Loosely speaking, there are 280
sub-pixels across, which works fine on monochrome monitors but on color
monitors screenwriter's 70 column mode is psychedelic.

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tjic
What does it mean that it's "sub pixel" ?

Given that each character is several pixels tall and wide, that seems like a
misnomer, unless I'm missing something...

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ugh
It’s sub pixel in the respect that it independently uses every controllable
dot on your display (three for every pixel, red, green and blue) to create the
illusion of black lines. Zoom in on the font and you will see that no pixel is
actually black or grey. It uses the underlying hardware structure of the pixel
display. It basically doesn’t manipulate the abstract and perfect pixel (throw
three colors at a small square and get the combination of the three perfectly
distributed across the surface of the square) but the underlying hardware
structure of pixels. That’s the reason why it breaks on different or rotated
hardware.

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mfukar
Finally, some real hacking on hn.

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Raphael
No Q, V, nor Y?

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bartl
And the "e" is just a copy of the "c". That's why he wrote "Lor _i_ m ipsum".

