Making things small
This is my first max5 post. So Congrats cycling on a job well done. I'm very impressed but mostly excited for the future.
I'm still doing quite a bit of getting used to Max5. One thing I really can't get my head around is not having the option to *not* antialias fonts. is there a way to do this?
I have to say that 9 pt anything antialiased is extremely hard on the eyes. In most max patches, we've got a ton of interface to cram into a small amount of space. being able to read small type EASILY would really be nice. I'd actually love 5x5 pixel characters.
On 6 May 2008, at 16:29, Matthew Aidekman wrote:
> I have to say that 9 pt anything antialiased is extremely hard on
> the eyes. In most max patches, we've got a ton of interface to cram
> into a small amount of space.
I suspect the canonical Max5 reply would be that there's not really
such a thing as size any more, when everything can be zoomed. If you
want to work at the level of scale which requires 9pt text, you can
always open a second view onto the patcher and zoom in, leaving the
first view open as a sort-of map.
Yeah, I miss 1984-era unaliased Monaco 9 as well, but all things must
pass.
-- N.
Nick Rothwell - nick@cassiel.com - www.cassiel.com
--- open-source goodies for MaxMSP: Python, Groovy, Nixie Tubes,
--- rotatable text bricks, databases: all at www.loadbang.net
If you use black text on a white background a small font is mostly readable.
That's the only solution I've come up with so far.
Another possibility might be using pictures with small text as a way to avoid antialiasing. I'm just about at that point, rather than making my interface gigantic and light colored.
On OS X , shouldn't this be respecting the system preference to not antialias text under X pixels?
Quote: nick rothwell / cassiel wrote on Tue, 06 May 2008 17:52
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> I suspect the canonical Max5 reply would be that there's not really
> such a thing as size any more, when everything can be zoomed. If you
> want to work at the level of scale which requires 9pt text, you can
> always open a second view onto the patcher and zoom in, leaving the
> first view open as a sort-of map.
Another approach would be to define a threshold for the _rendered_ font (ie, after scaling up/down for zoom factor) under which antialiasing gets turned off.
There also comes a point where the rendered font is so small that even disabling antialiasing won't help. At that point a greeking option might be a nice touch.
There may be higher priorities than these still, but maybe when Max 5 settles down someone might want to look at them.
> Yeah, I miss 1984-era unaliased Monaco 9 as well, but all things must
> pass.
There are some eternal verities which withstand even Chronos himself. But Moncao 9 is, thankfully, not one of them;-
-- P.
Monaco, not Moncao.
The timeout after which one cannot edit one's own messages is annoyingly short.-(
>
> Yeah, I miss 1984-era unaliased Monaco 9 as well, but all things must
> pass.
Wasn't the whole points un_anti_aliased fonts? Or aliased if you prefer? And not Monaco but Geneva? ;)
But seriously, I'd really like to have a 9 point Geneva font in Max 5... All this roundness is not that bad really, but the blurriness? Zooming is not the answer. I don't want to zoom in and out 1000 times per Maxing session to gain readability.
For now I set fonts to verdana (thanks to Timothy Place), in bold. It's quite nice on the eyes.
regards,
kjg
Quote: Peter Castine wrote on Wed, 07 May 2008 00:36
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> Another approach would be to define a threshold for the _rendered_ font (ie, after scaling up/down for zoom factor) under which antialiasing gets turned off.
I suggested that (if threshold < y then no AA) as well at some point. Glad to hear from someone that actually knows somethings about computers that this would actually be possible...
Quote: kjg wrote on Wed, 07 May 2008 03:29
----------------------------------------------------
> Quote: Peter Castine wrote on Wed, 07 May 2008 00:36
> ----------------------------------------------------
> > Another approach would be to define a threshold for the _rendered_ font (ie, after scaling up/down for zoom factor) under which antialiasing gets turned off.
>
> I suggested that (if threshold < y then no AA) as well at some point. Glad to hear from someone that actually knows somethings about computers that this would actually be possible...
>
>
----------------------------------------------------
that should be if y < threshold then no AA...
No more Belgium beer for me!
I just spent a little while poking around the raw material software site, and the bad news for people who want to see Monaco in all it's spikey goodness, is that the JUCE library that Max is built with doesn't support non-anti-aliased text.
-C
Klaas-Jan Govaart schrieb:
> For now I set fonts to verdana (thanks to Timothy Place), in bold.
> It's quite nice on the eyes.
I'd love to see a list of fonts which are common for Macs and PCs. Is
Verdana one of them? Just curious which fonts won't create cross
platform woes.
Which is the preferred font for musical notes? I guess one can take the
Finale fonts, as there is a free NotePad application which will install
them on any platform relevant for Max...
Stefan
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On 2008 May 7, at 7:09 AM, Stefan Tiedje wrote:
> Klaas-Jan Govaart schrieb:
>> For now I set fonts to verdana (thanks to Timothy Place), in bold.
>> It's quite nice on the eyes.
>
> I'd love to see a list of fonts which are common for Macs and PCs.
> Is Verdana one of them? Just curious which fonts won't create cross
> platform woes.
> Which is the preferred font for musical notes? I guess one can take
> the Finale fonts, as there is a free NotePad application which will
> install them on any platform relevant for Max...
Verdana is cross-platform. So is Tahoma. And Arial and Courier.
There are a couple of others.
I used Tahoma for everything in Hipno because it was the only cross-
platform font that didn't shift the baseline by 1 pixel when going
between the Mac and Windows. The shift of the baseline by a pixel was
really annoying in Max 4. I don't think that is a problem any more in
Max 5.
I'm using Verdana now because it seems the most readable (least
blurry) of any fonts at smaller sizes in Max 5. There are other fonts
that I like better, and that are clearer. Someone posted a link to
one that you can download and looks quite nice. The problem is that a
lot of my work (Hipno, Jamoma, Tap.Tools, etc.) are widely distributed
and I have to count on it looking the same on everyone's computer --
so I'm reduced to the lowest common denominators for font selection.
Verdana (and Georgia) are fonts designed for the screen as
counterparts to fonts like Arial and Times which were designed for
print.
Cycling '74 choose Arial. It isn't the best font for readability at
smaller sizes, but it is the best cross-platform font for supporting
Unicode characters. This is of pretty big importance for
compatibility between different localizations/languages. It also
looks "better" at larger sizes than Verdana according to many surveys
in this area. For a default font it makes perfect sense.
So everything is a trade-off. I don't use any Croatian, Japanese,
Hungarian, etc. letters on a daily basis. And I don't use larger font
sizes very often. So I choose Verdana and it seems to work well. But
Verdana isn't going to be the answer for everybody. It depends on you
and your needs.
best,
Tim
_________________
Tap.Tools / Teabox / Hipno / Hemisphere
http://electrotap.com
>> the JUCE library that Max is built with doesn't support
>>non-anti-aliased text.
wow... no aliased fonts for another 20 years... that is actually pretty saddening. well... life goes on
Quote: Chris Muir wrote on Wed, 07 May 2008 06:30
----------------------------------------------------
> I just spent a little while poking around the raw material software site, and the bad news for people who want to see Monaco in all it's spikey goodness, is that the JUCE library that Max is built with doesn't support non-anti-aliased text.
----------------------------------------------------
OK, that's a pretty compelling reason.
My initial reaction was "how can a major graphics library *not* support simple rasterized text?" I suppose part of the answer is that it's a cross-platform library, and rasterized fonts have a habit of looking different on different platforms. There are probably other reasons that will occur to me.
Anyway, that's what the hookah-smoking Caterpillars would call 'glory'.
There must be some kind of workaround, but probably a vile hack.
-- P.
Quote: Stefan Tiedje wrote on Wed, 07 May 2008 14:09
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> Which is the preferred font for musical notes? I guess one can take the
> Finale fonts, as there is a free NotePad application which will install
> them on any platform relevant for Max...
----------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time I used Sonata for generic music symbols. It's a bit bare-bones but on the plus side it was a PostScript font that wasn't tied to a particular software product. I'm not sure where I got it, but my recollection is of a source that was both free and legal.
But that was then. I see I never copied it over to my current hardware.
OS X provides some *very* bare-bones musical symbols in the System Fonts (Apple Symbols, plus many East Asian(!) fonts). Nothing x-platform about that, and the symbols are probably not enough for what you want to do.
Depending on what you need them for, you might to drop fonts altogether and make yourself a handful of images that you can use with LCD or something.
On the x-platform font front, I rather wish Apple would make the Lucida family available for Windows. Not only does it look more attractive (to my eye), it seems to have a far broader Unicode support than what I'm seeing in Verdana & Co. Admittedly, not everyone needs the glyph for triple integral every day of the week.-
-- P.
Matthew Aidekman schrieb:
>>> the JUCE library that Max is built with doesn't support
>>> non-anti-aliased text.
>
> wow... no aliased fonts for another 20 years... that is actually
> pretty saddening. well... life goes on
But JUCE is open source as far as I know. Just go ahead and add the
non-anti-aliased support... ;-)
And we will have 4000*3000 12"inch screens soon on our laptops.
Measuring fonts in pixels will vanish rather sooner than later...
dpi or something like that will be the definition of size in the future
I guess (and hope)...
Stefan
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Peter Castine schrieb:
> OS X provides some *very* bare-bones musical symbols in the System
> Fonts (Apple Symbols, plus many East Asian(!) fonts). Nothing
> x-platform about that, and the symbols are probably not enough for
> what you want to do.
As all notation software I know of, are using fonts to do their scores,
and all seem to be somehow different, my question is: are there unicode
equivalents for musical symbols at all? There should be I guess...
There must be a "correct" way to deal with musical symbols, but it
always looks pretty home brewed...
(Standardisation by market power only, ohne Sinn und Verstand...)
Stefan
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Stefan Tiedje------------x-------
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"sorry, no chance of disabling anti-aliasing for text - it's all done with
filled paths. (Surely nobody uses really bitmap fonts in the 21st century,
do they..??)"
http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juceforum/viewtopic.php?t=215&highlight=antialias
On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Stefan Tiedje
wrote:
> Peter Castine schrieb:
>
>> OS X provides some *very* bare-bones musical symbols in the System
>> Fonts (Apple Symbols, plus many East Asian(!) fonts). Nothing
>> x-platform about that, and the symbols are probably not enough for
>> what you want to do.
>>
>
> As all notation software I know of, are using fonts to do their scores, and
> all seem to be somehow different, my question is: are there unicode
> equivalents for musical symbols at all? There should be I guess...
> There must be a "correct" way to deal with musical symbols, but it always
> looks pretty home brewed...
> (Standardisation by market power only, ohne Sinn und Verstand...)
>
> Stefan
>
> --
> Stefan Tiedje------------x-------
> --_____-----------|--------------
> --(_|_ ----|-----|-----()-------
> -- _|_)----|-----()--------------
> ----------()--------www.ccmix.com
>
>
Quote: Stefan Tiedje wrote on Thu, 08 May 2008 13:12
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> my question is: are there unicode
> equivalents for musical symbols at all?
----------------------------------------------------
Klardoch.
Open up the Character Palette from the Input Menu (you do have this enabled, don't you?). Select All Characters from the View popup menu, select the By Category tab, open up the Symbols sub-hierarchy, scroll down to to the last item in the group and select it: "Musical Symbols". There are upwards of 300 code points defined. Unfortunately, the support with standard fonts (Apple Symbols) is pretty thin on the ground.
Quote: yair r. wrote on Thu, 08 May 2008 16:46
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> "sorry, no chance of disabling anti-aliasing for text - it's all done with
> filled paths. (Surely nobody uses really bitmap fonts in the 21st century,
> do they..??)"
> http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juceforum/viewtopic.php?t=215&highlight=antialias
----------------------------------------------------
Scroll down two messages further:
"Be carefull by what you say, two experienced font designers here in my studio would strongly disagree. "
Regardless of some people's desires for un-anti-aliased fonts, it's
clear that it's not a trivial thing to add this to JUCE. This is not
just some oversight on Cycling '74's part. I say that unless someone
here feels like hacking JUCE to add this functionality, we give it a
rest. I'm sure Cycling is aware of the feature request, and will be
weighing the pros and cons of adding this support, and will come up
with a priority for when and if they implement this.
-C
If someone wanted to make a platform-specific anti-anti-aliased text object, it should be possible once our UI object API is released. You would basically use the OS to render text to a bitmap and then show the image.
I think this would be a lot easier than messing with JUCE. We are, by the way, using a very heavily modified version of the library which reflects our specific requirements. Some of our changes have made it back into the main source distribution, but many of them are so idiosyncratic that they are unlikely to be adopted. I should also say that when writing UI objects in Max, you will not touch JUCE directly. We have built another API on top of JUCE that is C-based, not C++, and will be quite familiar to anyone who has already written Max externals. Except because it was mostly Rob and Joshua who did it instead of me, it's more rational and organized.
David Z.
Peter Castine schrieb:
> Unfortunately, the support with standard fonts (Apple Symbols) is
> pretty thin on the ground.
I'd say its practically zero... How do I change this display to a font
(and which font) which would show me at least which symbol belongs to
which unicode?
There is also some confusion for me about Unicode and UTF-8. It seem
Unicode is just a single 32-bit integer number, whereas UTF-8 is a
coding scheme to put this number into a format of up to 4 8-bit numbers
in a row, which is optimised for streaming and you can jump into any
character at will and still be able to decode it correctly.
In an application we don't really want to deal with streams of 8-bit
numbers, it would be much more convenient just to deal with a single
32-bit number... (I'll rename my translators I posted recently to utoa
and atou - seems more correct, as they translate the whole UTF-8 space
into the unicode numbers.)
Stefan
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Stefan Tiedje------------x-------
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