I've been thinking about subpixel antialiasing. My worries:
1. MS patent issues
2. rotation/flipping/etc.
Ad 1: There are open source projects that use subpixel antialiasing. AFAIK
they haven't been sued. But that should not be good enough, of course, for
us. If there were a patent-safe way of doing it, it would be really nice.
One solution is to have PalmFontConv have an option to render the fonts via
the underlying OS. Plucker would then have the capability for displaying
RGB bitmap fonts, but neither Plucker nor PalmFontConv would do any actual
antialiasing--all the antialiasing would be done by the desktop OS. And if
the desktop OS implements subpixel antialiasing, then that's great.
Ad 2: If I did my own subpixel antialiasing in PalmFontConv, this would be
sort of easy--I would just include a bunch of extra bitmap resources. Of
course one would need to choose between default RGB and BGR displays in
PalmFontConv, and then Plucker would have to detect Clie NX/NR OS-level
display flipping and Clie UX/Tungsten OS-level display rotation and select
the right bitmaps at the right time. This is messy but can be done. If the
desktop OS did the antialiasing, it would be harder. One can't coax WinXP
into subpixel antialiasing for triples aligned vertically (even the WinXP
Tablet Edition doesn't do it, even though it should). So rotation would be
out. One can switch between RGB/BGR, but I don't know how easily it is to
do it programmatically.
This may be all too complicated legally and technically to be worth it. But
any thoughts would be welcome.
Alex
--
Dr. Alexander R. Pruss
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057-1133 U.S.A.
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
online papers and home page: www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85
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"Philosophiam discimus non ut tantum sciamus, sed ut boni efficiamur."
- Paul of Worczyn (1424)
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