Martin Wille wrote:
Dave Harris wrote:
Specifically, it sounds rather like the problem of drawing text nicely at various resolutions. Consider TrueType, or Type 1 Postscript fonts. The basic character shape is defined by vectors, by Bezier curves. To render it prettily, so that, for example, all the vertical strokes on an 'm' are the same thickness regardless of how the letter falls onto the pixel grid, you need to add what Adobe call hints and Microsoft call grid-fitting.
Are you intending this system to be usable only on high-res desktop machines? Or are you including hand-held devices, phones and wotnot, that have relatively slow CPUs and where 640x320 is ambitiously high resolution?
There is some discussion about TrueType grid-fitting about half-way down this page: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/TTCH01.htm
Did you look at the examples on the antigrain.com website? They show that with good anti-aliasing and with subpixel accuracy you get very good results even when the display resolution is lower than the resolutions of the details of the displayed objects. The spirals at http://tinyurl.com/836fe look pretty impressive, IMHO.
And while you are there, don't forget to see the small "mono" "stereo" buttons. I never thought vector graphics can be this good at this scale. Usually, one ends up drawing such small widgets using bitmaps. Cheers, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boost-consulting.com http://spirit.sf.net