annotate / aliasing - thin white text on red background

[jyrgen]

Hello all,

i experienced a low white colour saturation when writing on a red background.

As the text appears thin (10 points) and is being antialiased against red, the white loses a lot...

It looks better when i increase the point size,
(since the original point size results in font lines of only about 1 pixel width)
or choose a bold weight, but both is not desired.

do you have a remedy for this ? can the antialiasing be turned off ?

secondly i found that using Helvetica point size 10 results in wrong letter spacing,
it looks way better with size 10.2 or 10.3...

thanks,

jyrgen

[fmw42]

I don't know if this will help, but look at the docs for +antialias

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/antialiasing/#intro

[jyrgen]

thank you for pointing me this !
(Haven't i searched for this topic in the manual ?...)

Apparently one must choose between antialiasing or not,
there seems to be no graduation.

regarding the second issue, i still found no means to
fix the chubby letter spacing with system font (Suse X) Helvetica
in 10pt... any ideas ??

best, j.

[anthony]

Note that the thickness of lines in a font is often a function of the 'density' at which the font is drawn. This defines the number of pixels per inch (real world unit) and as such tells the font how 'thin' it can make the lines in the font.

At a very high density a point at the same point size can have very thin lines in terms of the pixels involved, compared to the same font and pointsize at a very low density.

As such what you may like to do is try decreasing the density, while increasing the fonts pointsize. This should thicken 'thin' lines in fonts that have been 'properly' designed by a font foundary, and a professional font graphic designer.

As such try it on 'good' fonts like Arial, and Times.

There are no gurantees about this however.

see IM examples, Denisty vs Pointsize...
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/text/#pointsize

[jyrgen]

thanks anthony, in the meantime i switched to TTF fonts, which give
way better results. It seems to be true that PS fonts are
not really made for lowres small pointsizes as for webpages for
example. Also the letterspacing looks good now
best, jyrgen

[anthony]

And that is very true to. Postscript fonts are designed with 300 dpi and more pixels densities in mind. Most TTF is first designed with the display in mind and printers second.

let me know if you find the 'density' effect on fonts helpful. That information is from theory and the reading of how fonts are 'properly' designed. How effective it is in reality is another matter and it would be nice to get confirmation of this effect, and what fonts do as they are suposed to.