Turn on font antialiasing for front panel

[InfiniteNothing]

Is there a way to turn on font antialiasing  (Windows calls it ClearType) for the VI front panel. I'm trying to improve the "look" of my VI.

[Dennis_Knutson]

It's a system setting afaik. Have you tried turning it on and off to see if there is much of a difference? I've got a CRT at home and though I notice a difference with large fonts, my understanding is that it is only really useful with LCD screens.

[InfiniteNothing]

ClearType is on (in windows) but for some reason the VI front panels don't reflect it. Other programs like Word and Explorer do show antialiased text. I think it improves the look of the text quite a bit.

Here's a slightly exaggerated example:

 

Message Edited by InfiniteNothing on 09-08-2009 09:24 PM

Message Edited by InfiniteNothing on 09-08-2009 09:24 PM

[Dennis_Knutson]

As I said, I do notice a difference when I turn it on and off. The image below has ClearType turned on with the first line. It's the 13 point application font.

Message Edited by Dennis Knutson on 09-08-2009 10:40 PM

[InfiniteNothing]

Hmmm. You'll notice though that there's some jaggies in both images that you posted. I'm looking for something much smoother like the font I posted up above. I'm looking at fonts like Verdana, Ariel, or Calibri. I'm also looking at the fonts very large (like 72) because we want a very slick and clear interface. When I looked at the same font in Word vs LV it looked much better and smoother in Word. I'll try and do some experimentation tomorrow morning. 

Message Edited by InfiniteNothing on 09-08-2009 10:47 PM

[FraggerFox]

I believe that Cleartype also has an activex entry. Did you try to get it through the App property node?

[InfiniteNothing]

No, I don't need programmatic access so I have no need for the property node.

After doing some comparisons it looks like Word uses it's own antialiasing. That's disapointing because the default windows ClearType looks pretty bad.

If anyone has any ideas for getting better looking text, I'm open for suggestions. 

[altenbach]

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InfiniteNothing wrote:
Is there a way to turn on font antialiasing  (Windows calls it ClearType) for the VI front panel. I'm trying to improve the "look" of my VI.

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Antialiasing is not the same a cleartype.

Antialiasing uses shades of the same color. For example if you have a single-pixel horizontal line across the screen that goes up by one pixel over the lenght, you'll get two horizontal lines with a step in the center without antialiasing. With antaliasing, you would get two grey ramps, the lower from black to white and the upper from white to black. The weighted average of vertically adjacent pixels is centered at the fractional pixel position.

Cleartype takes advantage of th arrangment of the RGB pixels on typical LCD screens. This allows horizontal positioning of b/w graphics of with a resolution 1/3 of of a full pixel by mixing adjacent pixels of complemetary colors. e.g.

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

woud create a vertical white line at a slight angle. Cleartype does not work well for colored text (e.g. 100% red)

You can easily tell if cleartype is enabled by taking a screenshot and zooming into the text. From what I can tell, cleartype works for the front panel and diagram just fine if it's enabled. You can enable it here. Don't enable it for technologies with different color pixel arrangments (DLP, CRT, etc).

Getting smooth large fonts for labels and decorations should not be a problem. Simply take a screenshot of a font at 4x the size and resample the bitmap at 25% with antilaiasing enabled using some graphics editing program. Then embed the image in the FP.

Still, I would say that the typical fonts are just fine. If you are worried about tiny jaggies, maybe your monitor resolution is too low for it's size. 😉 Make sure that the the monitor is calibrated (autoadjust or similar) unless you are using DVI. Also make sure that your resolution setting exactly matches the native resolution of the panel.

Message Edited by altenbach on 09-09-2009 12:06 PM

[InfiniteNothing]

Interesting info on ClearType vs Antialiasing.  

I think there's a big difference between the text in Word (see the image in the last post) and the text in LV/Notepad. Look at the curves in the "s". My monitor is at the native resolution.

Good tips on the labels. Unfortunately I'm looking at dynamic text and I'm not about to make an image for each letter and flip them around in a pict ring ;). 

[RavensFan]

Honestly, they all look pretty much the same to me.  Yes, I do see some slight differences in the curves in the "s"'s.   To call them big differences is exaggerating more than a little bit.