Hi Paul-
On 2/10/14 3:41 PM, Paul Graham wrote:
Is it possible to improve the font quality in IDV, or are there any plans
afoot by the development team to do so?
The font quality varies from platform to platform. I find that I get
better quality on Windows than I do with Mac. But both suffer from the
effects you see. Text using fonts gets turned into a series of
triangles, filling the outline of the letter edges. I find Century
Gothic works pretty well, but still not great. The Hershey fonts use
lines only, but you see the lines when the text gets big.
It appears IDV does not handle scalable fonts, so often text appears
pixelated, jagged or with artefacts, especially when rescaled.
A possible solution would be to use the Java 3D Text3D objects. That
would require some significant development to add it to VisAD first, and
then access that in the IDV. I'm not aware of anybody who is interested
in doing that, although it would go a ways towards Unidata's goal of
"publication quality graphics" for the IDV.
Don
--
Don Murray
NOAA/ESRL/PSD and CIRES
303-497-3596
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/don.murray/
