First, if a font installed on your computer is being used (called device font or device text), then we use the operating system to draw the text. This means it will use ClearType on Windows if it is turned on, or, font smoothing on the Macintosh or Linux if it is turned on. Thus, Flash Player text using device text will look just like operating system text.
Second, if a font is embedded in the SWF, or, is linked to from a SWF (called embedded font or SWF font), we will use font smoothing, also known as anti-aliasing, that is built into the Flash Player. This high fidelity font smoothing has been around since Flash Player 8. The font smoothing doesn't use the original hints in a font, but preserves character outlines, and then applies auto-hinting. Text which is drawn using embedded fonts looks the same on all operating systems.
Another thing to note is that we provide some dials and knobs for font smoothing when authoring. For example, the designer can select “anti-alias for readability” or turn a couple of knobs for custom settings in Flash. These settings can also be set using ActionScript API’s. (Note that if you use “anti-alias for animation” Flash Player draws using Flash vectors, which provides smooth animations.) Again, these are only available to the author or designer, not to the user of Flash Player.
For bitmap font fans, the Flash authoring application can export pixel snapped (“bitmap”) fonts as an embedded font. This uses the shape drawing in the player, but looks exactly like the original bitmap representation. As long as you don’t scale it, of course.
I do understand that font smoothing can be a very personal taste. Some folks like to turn it off altogether, while others, like me, can’t imagine going back to bitmap text (and jaggies).
Let me know if you find this helpful in understanding how font smoothing works in Flash Player or have other comments about drawing text.
]]>1. Go to preferences (Cntrl-K or Cmd-K)
2. Choose "Page Display" under "Categories" on the upper left corner of the dialog
3. For "Rendering" select "For Laptop/LCD Screens" for the "Smooth Text" option
Font smoothing for CRT's is good, but I see a noticeable difference when I turn on smoothing for LCD's. We use a number of techniques to optimize for LCD's. One major one is to take advantage of the greater resolution of LCD's due to the layout of the parts of a pixel. On a CRT, there are three blurry dots that make up a pixel. On an LCD, there are red, green and blue subpixels next to each other, usually in the horizontal row. We can take advantage of this to position characters (I'm going to use the word characters, but I should really be saying glyphs to be technically accurate) with greater fidelity, essentially to 1/3 pixel resolution. With font smoothing, we've always had the ability to position characters at subpixel positions, typically at 1/4 pixel resolution for CRT's. This improves character spacing.
We also play a number of tricks with the scaling and sampling of characters, and with stem alignment with pixels. Control of color is critical, both in the overall color of the text (which is essentially the number of pixels turned on and the uniformity of "grayness" of a paragraph), and in the minimization of color ghosting (which can make your text look like it is decorated with Christmas lights).
Please try turning on smoothing for LCD Screens. I'd love to hear about how it changes your reading experience.
Check it out!
I want to let folks know that we have an online seminar on Apollo coming up in a couple of weeks. It's scheduled for November 28 at 3 pm ET. Luis Polanco, the Apollo Product Manager, will be presenting.
To learn more and to register see: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=648909&loc=en_us
Put it on your calendar!
Most of my time was spent at the Apollo pod. Oddly, we were at the back of the exhibit room, facing the back wall. But, folks found us nonetheless. We got lots of time and focus at the keynotes each morning. At the pod, I found most folks telling me that they really love Flex and that they can’t wait for Apollo -- everyone wants to be on our private beta. We will have a version up on Adobe labs in early 2007.
The demos of applications on Apollo were a real hit, including Ascension (Mike Chambers' music app), eBay on the desktop, the Buzzword word processor, and the xif collaboration client. Lots of folks told me about the applications they have now in Flex or Flash or HTML that they want to move to Apollo. This is across a broad array of industries, from elearning to government to finances.
Many asked me about the installation process for Apollo and Apollo rich internet applications (RIA). The Apollo runtime needs to be installed just once, like Flash Player or Adobe Reader. Your internet application can be installed just like a traditional desktop application: download from a website, pushed out to desktops, installed from a CD and so on. Once on the desktop, an Apollo RIA will be integrated into the desktop, allowing launch from OS mechanisms, such as the Start menu on Windows or the Dock on Macintosh. Another question was about the security model, which is an area we are still working on internally. That’s obviously an area we need to communicate about early.
Everyone is excited about incorporating Flash and HTML and PDF into their desktop RIA’s in Apollo. You can see the FAQ, presentations and other stuff we have right now up on the Adobe labs website for Apollo.
]]>It's always been easy for end-users to create, annotate, and read PDF documents using Acrobat, Adobe Reader and lots of other products. And, over the years we've added lots of capabilities around forms fill-in, multimedia content, document review & comment, 3D, print production, JavaScript, photo sharing and so on. And, there are a number of Adobe and third-party tools that let developers manipulate PDF documents programatically. But, there are many more developers who are much more comfortable with XML as a data format. They can now use PDF much more efficiently, creating new services and applications, integrating PDF more tightly into their document workflows.
A few high points from my perspective:
- ZIP-based packaging, combining granular PDF pieces and binary data like images, fonts, movies
- SVG page content
- Extensibility mechanisms allowing you to integrate your own data
- Completely compatible with standard PDF: 1:1 mapping between file format constructs
- Easy manipulation due to granular approach, e.g., add/remove/edit standard content like annotations, just by putting an XML-file in the right place
Can't wait to see what folks figure out to do with this.
Nabeel
]]>Innovation and the Energy Crisis
Moderator: Robert C. Armstrong, Professor of Chemical Engineering and co-director of the Energy Research Council, MIT
Panelists:
Joseph Romm, Founder and Executive Director, Center for Energy & Climate Solutions;
Nathan Lewis, Professor, California Institute of Technology;
Kelly R. Fletcher, Sustainable Energy Advanced Technology Leader, GE Global Research
Robert Armstrong shared some info on the energy industry. Per the MIT Energy Council Report of May 2006:
- Energy is a multi-trillion dollar industry
- We consume energy at the rate of 14 terawatts of energy of which the US uses about a quarter [a terawatt is too large an amount for me to fathom]
- Anticipate doubling total energy production by 2050
- Anticipate tripling electricity production by 2050
Joseph Romm, who has a book called Hell and High Water coming out in January, talked about the need for action now. When he talks to leading climate experts they are very alarmed. Solutions will require huge amounts of capital when the world gets serious. We have to start to deploy all possible solutions today, we can’t wait for technology to solve this in the future. Though, new technology research and development is also needed. Dr. Romm’s blog is at climateprogress.org.
Nate Williams said that things are worse than Dr. Romm indicated. The issue is not about science at this point, but about risk management. We have four options to pursue:
- clean coal – has lots of risks
- nuclear – again, lots of issues, need breeder reactors because not enough uranium…
- solar – that’s where the energy is; we need improved efficiencies/technologies; we need a way to store the energy (he likes chemical fuels)
- biofuels
Kelly Fletcher talked about the need for strong and stable government policies around CO2. Whether a tax or a trading systems, we need a clear policy.
They stated the big issue is still education – people need to be made aware of the severity of the problem and the need to take action now. There was a poll on how much more people would be willing to pay on their utility bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the answer was less than $10/month. That suggests there is still not a lot of public resolve to address climate change. Even with that, the public is ahead of government leadership.
There was lots more great information and I hope to be able to post a link to a video of the panel (by keeping an eye on http://www.technologyreview.com/events/tretc/media.aspx)
]]>Also, for those who haven't looked at it yet, S3 is also very cool. Basically a storage service with three calls: get, set, delete, where you provide a handle and a blob. Again, very scalable and replicated storage, where you pay as you go.
What excites me about all of this is that they are removing barriers to entry for all of us to get our really cool products out. We don't have to deal with what Jeff calls the muck, liking buying servers, settting up data centers and so on. As he put it, "We make muck, so you don't have to."
Check it out at aws.amazon.com.
]]>A few of my favorites:
http://www.dqbooks.com/
http://www.zumbakamera.com/bendito.html
http://www.reisenthel.com/ (click on products then use buttons at bottom)
http://media.academyart.edu/freeclass/index.html
http://illustree.at/referenzen/oe3_spot_english/ (this is hilarious)
http://www.cove.org/flade/ (very cool physics engine demos)
http://www.agencynet.com/
http://www.samorost.net/samorost2/
Finally, I wasn't quite sure where to put this, but it's my favorite quote from the overall show, by speaker Brendan Dawes while talking about digital watch that required pressing a button to see the time.
“Cool and stupid go together a lot of the time”
]]>Kevin invited several speakers to come up, and asked each of them to share a sneak peak of something that has not been seen publicly before.
Garrett Nantz of Big Spaceship demoed the very cool Nike Air experience http://www.nike.com/nikeair/us/ on Linux using an early build of FlashPlayer 9.
Mark Anders of Adobe demoed Flex Builder 2 on the Mac, where he wrote a small app, PhotoDemo, pulling in photos from Flickr. He then converted it to an Apollo app, and ran it on the Mac from the desktop (and pulled up pictures of his birds, sure wish I could remember the tag…). As I mentioned in my first blog, we have an Apollo wiki on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo.
Then Justin Cole-Everett and Mike Downey came up to talk about Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3 Preview, now on Adobe labs, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash9as3preview/. Justin showed us a particle effect script, running in both ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. With the new ActionScript 3 VM (virtual machine), it looked liked the effect was running about 10 times faster.
Mike then demoed PSD import with rich control over options. And, demoed saving a timeline to ActionScript 3 code. Very cool stuff!
]]>After that I joined our core technology organization, which does stuff like deliver graphics engines, font technology, scripting support, UI tools, XML libraries, PDF tools and more to most of the product teams in Adobe. I actually spent about half of my time at Adobe there, starting out as a developer and moving into management. Following that I formed a platform strategy group, which I did for a couple of years.
Then, this year, after the integration of Macromedia, I joined our Adobe client platform group. My role is to be the kind of guy who looks at cross-business and cross-product issues, and, who does some software architecture stuff as well.
When I’m not working, my favorite thing is to be riding my bike around the backroads of Sonoma County where I live. My main bike is a 2004 Specialized Comp Roubaix, which I have to thank a close friend for recommending to me.
My main areas of interest right now include electronic documents (big surprise;-) and Apollo. And, bridging the Adobe and Macromedia worlds. I expect to be blogging on these topics. You can read a bit about Apollo at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo.
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