• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

First OS to have truly smooth font characters

P

punchy71

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2011
Messages
100
Location
U.S.
Starting with the oldest personal computer you can think of and moving forward in time, which operating system made each individual on-screen letter (or character) look like an actual typed letter on a page without jagged edges around the entire perimeter of the character but nice and smooth like? Remember when the 8-bit computers characters looked like blocky, jagged-edged letters (some were even distorted in shape to boot). Well, which system/OS, by default, was the first to make them look like nice silky smooth calligraphy letters done with black ink on a crisp white paper? Which OS was that and which platform?

Thank you
 
The earliest I've used is Mac OS 8. I'm certain that it existed in typesetting software long before that. Wikipedia says RISC OS had it in 1990, but the example images I've found for that seem to be more blur than clarification.
 
punchy71 said:
look like an actual typed letter on a page without jagged edges around the entire perimeter of the character but nice and smooth like?
Click to expand...

The term you are looking for is anti-aliased fonts.

The earliest devices I can think of in common use were devices to create photographic slides for presentations, and phototypesetters.
Graphics terminals had this as an option. The AED 767 could produce anti-aliased text.
Video titlers do this as well, doing way, way back, even before they were computerized.
The Amiga Video Toaster was one of the earliest commercial systems using a PC
for video effects and titling.
 
punchy71 said:
Starting with the oldest personal computer you can think of and moving forward in time, which operating system made each individual on-screen letter (or character) look like an actual typed letter on a page without jagged edges around the entire perimeter of the character but nice and smooth like? Remember when the 8-bit computers characters looked like blocky, jagged-edged letters (some were even distorted in shape to boot). Well, which system/OS, by default, was the first to make them look like nice silky smooth calligraphy letters done with black ink on a crisp white paper? Which OS was that and which platform?
Click to expand...

What's the name of the class you're taking? And the name of the professor.
If we're doing all the work, we'll going to want the course credit.

Thank you
 
lol, what's funny is you're not the first two ask him that.. was doing some digging just for the hell of it and it's pretty routine on other forums. Not that he's up to anything, he's asking legitimate emulation questions too.

So punchy, what sorta stuff are you up to? I don't think you did an intro thread here, you could if you want to tell us a little about yourself, your history with computers and what you enjoy using them for these days.
 
Won't be the first time that it happened. :(

Imagine using a card catalog with real physical cards and getting an answer would involve actually reading literature to determine. No internet, no Google, no lies posted online. Just books.

Now get off of my lawn.
 
punchy71 said:
I think I found the terms I was looking for "Bitmap" vs. "TrueType" fonts.
Click to expand...

Not quite. The more proper term is anti-aliased.

Bitmap fonts are just that. The characters are stored as a fixed resolution grid of values for each pixel. If you wanted a larger type face, the lower resolution is just scaled up and is still grainy or aliased.

TrueType employs a glyph primitive rendering system to accomplish anti-aliasing. An 'A' is stored as a series of glyphs which in-turn are a series of graphic primatives (eg draw line, arc, etc) on a virtual coordinate system. When you want to draw an A, it's rendered to the resolution of your target type face. Then the resulting bitmap is typically cached along with the type size/style information in case there is another A a few letters along in the string you are displaying.
 
barythrin said:
So punchy, what sorta stuff are you up to? I don't think you did an intro thread here, you could if you want to tell us a little about yourself, your history with computers and what you enjoy using them for these days.
Click to expand...

Okay, I typed up an introduction and put it in the introduction section. Enjoy! =)
 
I remember noticing the very smooth (monochrome) text on what I now presume were Sun-3 3/50's. Much later than the Alto of course.
 
punchy71 said:
I think I found the terms I was looking for "Bitmap" vs. "TrueType" fonts.
Click to expand...
The fonts were blocky because the resolution was low. When the GUIs came along, initially they used bitmap fonts that became blocky when they were scaled to larger sizes.

Around 1990, Adobe had a product for Mac and Windows 3.0 called Adobe Type Manager which included fonts that were scalable without becoming blocky at larger sizes. A few years later, Microsoft came out with True Type fonts.

Still later came Clear Type, which only works on LCD - type monitors, to smooth the appearance of the edges further using "sub-pixel rendering". Steve Gibson claims this was used by Steve Wozniak on the Apple ][.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Didn't Bitstream fonts precede TrueType?
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truetype

Bitstream is a font foundry, and supplied competing Type 1 fonts to Adobe, as well as their own format.
The prices of fonts from Adobe and Bitstream was quite high though, at the time (hundreds of dollars
per font). MSFT using Truetype in Windows 3.1 caused an explosion in the availability of inexpensive
outline fonts.

There was a lot of work done at Xerox PARC on outline fonts. The standard display on an Alto was bitonal
so you didn't get real antialiasing on it. CRTs do lowpass filter the edges of pixels, so you can get the illusion
of antialiasing. That was what you saw on high resolution Sun black and white displays as well.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top