FWIW (and while we wait for Jerry to tell us what was in the missing screen shot), I’ve abandoned the “offset it by 0.5 points” approach, in the last year or two. I don’t necessarily have an unarguable justification, but my reasoning runs along these lines:
1. For general drawing, when the thin line might be drawn along with non-vertical and non-horizontal lines, the non-vertical and non-horizontal lines are going to be antialiased anyway, so the mixture of drawing outcomes (anti-aliased and not) looks wrong. You can’t eliminate the antialiasing in diagonal lines, so you have to *add* antialiasing to orthogonal lines to get a consistent appearance. It only looks really crappy when the pixels are really big. 2. It’s not 0.5 points anyway, it’s 0.5 pixels. Now, it’s possible to find the connection between points and pixels on any given device, but the whole enterprise starts to fall down when the relationship isn’t 1:1 or 1:2. If the pixels are very small, the perceptual results are not linear — not to mention that the perception is affected by things like the sub-pixel geometry of the screen. (Keep in mind that on the pixeliest new Apple displays, there’s a scaling up AND a scaling down involved in going from points to hardware pixels. With different scale factors.) 3. Seriously, at this point in history, non-retina is done as a technology. There’ll be plenty of 1:1 screens out there for a while, but (I’d argue) it’s hardly worth spending development effort on them. With 1:2 screens it’s already somewhat questionable whether any development effort in pixel alignment is necessary. With 1:3 screens — and how many months do we have left until that becomes the mobile hardware norm? — I’d remove the word “somewhat” from that claim. Of course, there are plenty of specific scenarios — specific apps — where it still makes sense to pay attention to pixels. But not for long, perhaps. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
