[thelist] Flash & Gif

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Fri Aug 3 08:02:19 CDT 2001


> From: "Chris Houston." <chris at nabumedia.com>
>
> Sharon said that Mark Ottenberg said:
> > a) avoid "blending" (that is, make your text pixels as "one-color
> > solid" as possible, either using the background color or the text
> > color to fill in any pixels that are anti-aliased). This makes them
> > "blocky" which reduces file size. Space between the letters
> > compresses better if the characters are solid (blocky).
> 
> This has got to be wrong. Flash stores the vector outline of each
> letter from each font it's going to be using, then renders it on the
> clients machine. Whether the file says "write these letters and
> antialias them" or "write these letters and don't antialias them"
> isn't going to make any difference to the file size, per se. It might
> make the rendering speed higher, though.

that commentary was in response to a question on how to optimize 
Flash movies for output to animated .gif...  if it were just a 
discussion of Flash, then yes, that would be odd, but it was all 
about exporting to a different format...

> The current trend towards little, aliased fonts isn't technologically
> based, it's fashion based.

well, this is partly true...

the use of aliased fonts over anti-aliased fonts at smaller sizes 
enhances readability... assuming the size of the font was legible to 
the user to begin with...

the use of those 7pt aliased fonts, on the other hand, isn't about 
readability, it's about design... yes, they read better than Arial at 
7pt, aliased or otherwise, but they're still usually too small for your 
users without decent eyes...





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