Thanks for trying to help, I appreciate the thought, I have already considered all the alternatives and chosen the best for the situation at hand.ENV1 wrote:It really pains me to see otherwise well desigend UIs let down by unsharp fonts. So if i may suggest something that works quite well for myself; dont use whatever you were using for the labels, (Photoshop?), go the extra mile and make your labels with Windows Paint. Its no doubt a lot of extra work, not to mention tedious since Paint doesnt do layers or transparency. But since Paint is using Windowses font anti-aliasing, which is by far the best of all graphics apps i know, the result will be more than worth it because your texts will be actually sharp that way and thus infinitely better legible.
To demonstrate how huge a difference this really makes, heres a quick comparison shot.
<click for full size>
There are so many problems with using sub-pixel rendered text into bitmaps that I won't go into them all here, but the major two are lack of support for a scalable interface and no support for screens that do not have an RGB pixel layout (eg a non-lcd / led, and lcd/led with BGR layout or an lcd/led rotated 90 deg). The only decent way to use sub-pixel rendering of text is to do it programmatically (ie generate the text at run time for a particular target screen pixel layout), but this then loses all subtle shading that you get for rendering things directly from 3D, using a 16 samples per pixel catmull-rom anti-aliasing, which is how the rest of the image is also rendered.
In addition the font you used is larger than the one I used, so the text doesn't fit (eg the words MANUAL and STEP SEQ are not in your image), and the letter forms are too thin so I can see coloured bands everywhere which adds up to it all looking horrible (eg on MULT the vertical line of the L looks pink).
Please compare my method (top) and your method (bottom) when you have a scalable interface like The Drop has:
