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— 21 Cool iPhone Apps - Stanza
Text rendering quality is down in 1.8
Fri, 04/10/2009 - 07:53 — Anonymous
Hi,
I've upgraded to 1.8 yesterday, and found that the rendering of the text much worse than it was before, especially in landscape. I've made a screenshot (sadly I can't really go back to the previous version to make a comparison :( )
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8848/img0019m.png
Look how some groups of letter are somewhat thicker that they should be - it kinda looks like the text has been rendered on a bigger scale and then the whole screen has been scaled down - which leads to some pixel alignment issues.
For example, the "Probably" in the middle - the first B has its vertical bar fuzzy, the second one doesn't. Looks bad.
Those bolder areas are really distracting - I mean, in an application which purpose is to offer text to read, the text rendering quality should be as high as possible, right?
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How to convert Pages documents to Stanza books
Both my wife and I are interested in publishing books and articles which could be downloaded with Stanza by iPod Touch and iPhone. Is this an impossible dream? How would one go about this?
The answer varies
depending on a number of factors e.g., do you want to sell the books or make them available for free, are your books already electronic (and if so, what formats), etc. The best thing would be to contact sales via http://www.lexcycle.com/contact
Text rendering is still flawed
The text gets somewhat bolded in landscape mode. It doesn't work bad in georgia, for example, but in arial/helvetica looks bad. It can be easily seen with light text over a black background.
Arial, black background, portrait
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3488669650_5bee86f7d4.jpg
Arial, black background, landscape
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3634/3488670020_3442219c73.jpg
Arial, white background, portrait
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3572/3487860869_c4cfe5b8b0.jpg
Arial, white background, landscape
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3361/3487860689_037431fc5c.jpg
Georgia, white background, portrait
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3537/3487853481_da2b1139c0.jpg
Georgia, white background, landscape
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3546/3487850423_8aa4438b30.jpg
Do you have any background
Do you have any background image set (possibly with such a high opacity that it isn't showing up)? That is one area that can affect text rendering quality in landscape mode.
Also, I assume you have verified that you are using Stanza 1.8.1 (and not 1.8).
If you need to add text
If you need to add text rendering right now, consider using System.Drawing.Graphics.DrawString to draw text onto a Bitmap, and display the Bitmap with a TexSubImage2D call. It will be slow if the text changes every frame, but it will work ok as a quick and dirty solution. I won't be doing this in OpenTK, just something to keep in mind if you have an immediate need.
life experience degrees | buy degree
No, I don't have any
No, I don't have any background image. I'm using a plain colour ;). Are you able of reproducing the problem?
And yes, I'm using 1.8.1, but this problem isn't new. It appeared some updates ago -don't remember in which one-. I think it wasn't present in the first versions.
You're right ... that's very
You're right ... that's very interesting. It seems to be especially noticeable with Arial. We'll look into why this might be happening, but I fear it might be a low-level iPhone text rendering issue.
Maybe, but I don't think so.
Maybe, but I don't think so. eReader doesn't seem to have this problem. Let's hope it's an easy fix ;).
Text rendering quality still a problem in 1.9
Text rendering quality is still bad in landscape mode with Stanza 1.9. Is this basic issue of no importance for Lexcycle? I think it should be a higher priority in the bug list.
This is still known to happen
This is still known to happen with some fonts, but most of the fonts should be rendering the same in landscape as in portrait. Can you reset Stanza's settings (by going to the top-level "Library" screen, tapping the gears icon in the upper-right corner, tapping the settings button, and then scrolling to the bottom and tapping "Reset All Settings" and then restarting Stanza) and try again? If the portrait and landscape views of a page look considerably different, can you post the screenshots again?
Rendering bug with all fonts and black background
Hi, I'm the Carlos that reported this issue. I still can reproduce this bug after a reset and with all the fonts. It's very easy to see with a black background. Here you have examples with two of the most common used fonts, arial and georgia:
Arial portrait: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2432/3748528007_db1b2c2c7e.jpg
Arial landscape: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2528/3748528111_a7a81f7a77.jpg
Georgia portrait: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2572/3749340360_172815f1d6.jpg
Georgia landscape: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2491/3748552607_ab2a5e1f45.jpg
I have reproduced it in all the iPhones that I've tried.
We agree that the fonts
We agree that the fonts appear wider in landscape mode when the background is inverted. We're not sure the cause of the problem, but we expect it has something to do with font aliasing behaving differently in landscape mode. We'll continue to investigate the problem, but for the time being we unfortunately don't have any work-around to recommend aside from using dark text on a light background (in which case this problem doesn't seem to be as bad). Note that for nighttime reading, you can reduce the brightness of the screen by swiping vertically downwards, which some people prefer over reading inverted text.
It is almost as if the
It is almost as if the Landscape mode is using different "weight" to Portrait as the font seems bolder. Interestingly enough I prefer the Landscape version to the Portrait one, while you seem to be the other way around.
Stanza 1.8.1 Is Now Available
Let us know if this update corrects what you were seeing.
It's the same in portrait but
It's the same in portrait but different in landscape, and it has to do with the new custom backgrounds. We know about this, and we've fixed it already for the next version.
Awesome! Any idea when this
Awesome!
Any idea when this new version will be available? I know I know, it's a lame question :)
It is not a lame question at
It is not a lame question at all, but it's impossible to say when it will be available because once it's ready and we submit it to Apple, it could take them months to actually approve it.