fonts and their display

Caled
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Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:45 am

fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

I have three screenshots here. The first is of mudlet, a brand new profile, no changes.
As you can see, the letters are fairly bold, and clipped - as though they are being displayed a little too close together. I figured that this was just going to be a part of mudlet to put up with. Something about the display engines capabilities.

The second screenshot is a font that shows after I import a profile Leigh sent me. I can't find anywhere in his scripts that defines a font, but it displays in this font nonetheless. As you can see, it is a very clearly defined font, quite easy to read. It doesn't display ascii maps very well, but it does prove that Mudlet's display engine can display prompts nicely. It must be the font pack Mudlet uses (maybe because of it being cross-platform? I've noticed that fonts in general look different in Linux).

The third screenshot is of CMUD, and it is what I would really like in Mudlet. A nice looking fixed width font, correctly spaced so that ascii art, maps or tables are displayed optimally, and no bloated/bold characters.

Its not that font type is different between Mudlet and CMUD, though in this case CMUD is using Courier, while mudlet is not. If I set the prompt to Courier in Mudlet, the display is very ugly, and nothing at all like how CMUD looks.

Is there anything that can be done about this?
font1.png

Caled
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Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:45 am

Re: fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

Screenshot of mudlet after I imported my friends profile.
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font2.png
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Caled
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

Screenshot of CMUD using Courier.
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font3 copy.png

Caled
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

Just to prove it, here is Mudlet displaying Courier as well.
Attachments
font4.png

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Heiko
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Heiko »

1. If you chose "Courier New" it should look better as this is an anti aliased font while Courier doesn't have AA-hinting. Mudlet is currently forcing anit aliasing which can indeed lead to clippings in the case of light writing on dark background if the font is too small for the used screen resolution. After all this is what AA is all about. Solution -> larger fonts or look for a font that looks good on your screen/resolution. This has nothing to do with Mudlet's display engine, but with inherent font/resolution/AA variance on different computers, resolutions, font sizes and screens.

2. CMUD displays Courier without AA. This is why it looks rugged and has lots of little holes in it. On low resolutions in conjunction with small font sizes, non-anti aliased fonts look better because the resolution is simply not high enough. On higher resolution or larger font sizes, anti aliasing looks much better though and the resulting high quality text display is much easier on the eyes. However, in your case I can see that we need an option to disable anti aliasing. It has been suggested by several users to make an option to disable anti aliasing. This will make Mudlet display courier exactly like cmud. I have actually forgotten about this request because most people were very satisfied with the default high quality AA font. I'll add an option for this in the next version. Until then: Use a higher screen resolution and make the fonts larger. For you the font size will stay the same, but it will look a lot better as the AA engine has a lot more dots to use to render the font.

3. Regarding the y-axis clippings: just make the window a tiny little bit smaller or larger until those are gone. This is due to missing code in Mudlet, but no problem if you know how to handle it.

4. Regarding the strange font after you imported a package from a friend: The answer is simple: Your friend has exported a profile that contained a font that is not available on your computer. There are thousands of fonts, so this is hardly surprising. If the font cannot be loaded, the window system choses an illegal font i.e. a non mono spaced font. This is why the output looks weird.

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Vadi
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Vadi »

Remember that atm exporting a profile exports the users settings in it too. Need to delete the HostPackage portion at the beginning not to get them...

Caled
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

Okay, interesting point with the anti-aliasing. I've compared Courier to Courier new in CMUD, and I think I actually prefer Courier. Just a personal preference, and possibly an uncommon one.

That said, in the process I also compared CMUD's Courier new, to Mudlet's Courier new. Same size (10), same monitor, same font name. My screen is a 22" widescreen lcd, 1680X1050. There is a screenshot of this at the bottom, the top being Mudlet and the bottom being CMUD (click on the image to open it in its own window, as the image is displaying strangely when it is embedded directly in the page).

As you can see, Mudlet is displaying this font with much thicker characters. I compared several other common fonts in a similar fashion (Arial, Comic sans and Fixedsys) and each time I noticed the same thing. So here's hoping the anti-aliasing option in preferences will help.

Clipping the edges:
Resizing the window can help? I play with it maximised in my screen, but for the sake of testing I just now tried resizing my window in varying amounts; it had no noticeable effect. Do you have more details on how I can fix this?
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fonts.png

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Heiko
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Heiko »

Had another look at your clippings. You seem to be using some kind of mudbot/proxy to connect to your MUD.
You have to enable "send GA after prompt" in your bot. The MUD is sending this, but your bot isn't passing it on to Mudlet. Those clippings will disappear then. If this doesnt fix the clipping issues, I'll look into this in more detail. This shouldn't happen during gameplay except in rare cases.

I'll make "No Anti Alias" the default option. Good that you've come up with this topic. Text display quality is excellent on the systems I use, so I wouldn't have noticed these problems.
I'll update the Windows installer beta-10pre8 tonight but I won't change the name I'll also fix the split screen divider + add the raw stream log/load option.

Caled
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Caled »

In that final screenshot, I connected to Aetolia directly with Mudlet, though in the CMUD one I did connect through the proxy.

I tested again though, this time in Achaea, with no proxy. The clipping is still very much present. It is noticeable with the default Mudlet font (Bitstream sans vera) but more obvious with Courier new.

I'm not particularly attached to Courier, by the way, it was just a useful comparison to make as it is one of the few fixed width fonts available in CMUD as well as Mudlet.

I fired up my laptop (which dual-boots linux and windows xp). The display of the font is great in Ubuntu (though I am still unable to get rid of the clipped edges). The clipped edges are less noticeable when the font does not look all fat, but ascii maps still don't line up. The interesting thing though, is that when I booted Windows XP up, the font displayed the same as it did in Ubuntu. It is only on my PC that this display problem occurs. I am fairly sure it is not the monitor, as I connected the monitor to my laptop to make sure.

Both use the exact same windows XP install. Service pack 3, both ATI graphics cards, even similar models. (HD2400 and HD2300) What information would you like from me to help, would a dxdiag file help, perhaps?

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Heiko
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Re: fonts and their display

Post by Heiko »

I've implemented non-anti aliased text in my local version now and tests have shown that Caled is correct and that the quality of the fonts is much better for lower resolutions.
I'll need a bit more time to make it publicly available because I want to optimize a few other things as well. I've also fixed the line clipping issues.

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