I'm a graphics designer who creates images for applications. To place
Delphi's cruddy-stairstepped letters and words on them really hurts my
feelings.

Macromedia's Director implements anti-aliased text. At design-time
(anti-aliased then, too) the letters are "live" ie, they can be manipulated
as text. When the project is "compiled" the letters become part of the
image below it...fonts aren't stored and so distribution and licensing AND
system fonts issues are avoided.

Far from advertising the beauty of Director (Delphi aps far out perform
those created in Director or Authorware) I am hoping for an anti-aliased
text Delphi 3 component or help/suggestions in developing one. I sincerely
believe such a thing would go a long way in improving the aesthetics of
most applications.

Kevn Lambson
www.cut.net/klambson
klamb...@cut.net

Hy Kevn,
this standpoint is somehow a philosopical one. Those who want to have
antialiased Fonts can get them if they setup their Plus package under Win95
or NT4.0. I also think smothed fonts are nicer. But i dont want to generate
monster applications by converting simple things like forms to bitmaps.
Keep things like taste estetics.... with the users therefore Windows has all
these nice setup features.

regards Horst

I'm afraid I agree with Horst on this issue.  Anti-aliased fonts obviously
look prettier, but at very high resolutions nobody really notices.  The
bitmap idea sucks - unless you forced users to run fixed size, fixed
appearance, fixed colour depth apps, which is not a nice thing to do.  If
you just want a one off for a form background, you could always resort to
PhotoShop.

I appreciate your point about system fonts - writing the sort of app you do
must be pretty difficult (otherwise everyone would buy Delphi Standard which
is much cheaper then Director).

Have you checked the Delphi SuperPage?  If there is a component that does
what you want, it will be there.

Good Luck.

David Barnard

Hello, Kevn,

In a back issue of the Delphi Informant, there was an antialiasing
algorithme that worked pretty well. I don't have it handy (you shopuld check
the D Informant web site at www.informant.com/delphi) but here's the idea:

First, draw the text on a memory bitmap at twice the size you want it
displayed. Then, for each pixel on the final bitmap, calculate the average
of the 4-pixel square equivalent on the 'big' bitmap and use that value as
the 'small' bitmap's color. If you work on color bitmap, you'll have to make
the average for every color compound (R,G and B).

The exemple I saw was using the pixel array to read and write pixel values
but, if you want to avoid growing old while waiting for your text to
display, you should use the scanline property introduced with D3.

Finally, to avoid having to re-render the text each time you update the
display, only render it when either the text or the the font changes and
save the final bitmap. Be also carefull about the fact that this does NOT
support automatic transparency: each time your backgroun changes, you have
to re-render the text to have a correctly antialiased image.

Good luck,
Stephane