Anti-Aliasing of Text

[Askr]

Hey there,

I'm making a game with very simple graphics and the default anti-aliasing of the text is really unfitting.
Is there a way to render the text without any anti-aliasing at all? I've been looking through the documentary and haven't found anything.

Thanks in advance

[Acrobat]

try to set x and/or y position on float coords (+= 0.375,  += 0.5)

[Laurent]

Can you show a screenshot? Antialiasing cannot be disabled for text, but you shouldn't need to do that.

[mastodona7x]

Maybe I'm missing something but why can't you just use a really simple looking font?? Plenty of free pixel-looking fonts here for instance?? http://www.dafont.com/bitmap.php, download, stick it in a /fonts/ folder in your project dir

sf::Font font;
     if (!font.loadFromFile("fonts/somesimplefont.ttf"))
         return EXIT_FAILURE;

[Askr]

Hej,

try to set x and/or y position on float coords (+= 0.375,  += 0.5)

I tried that but it didn't really improve anything. In fact it appeared to me even more blurred.

Can you show a screenshot? Antialiasing cannot be disabled for text, but you shouldn't need to do that.

Yeah, sure. I added it as an attachement.

Maybe I'm missing something but why can't you just use a really simple looking font??

I'm using this font here: Terminalscope

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[Laurent]

Can you try the same text but in a minimal app? This way we're sure that it's really the text itself, and not a side effect of something else in your game.

[Askr]

I also added the source:

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            RenderWindow window = new RenderWindow(new VideoMode(640, 480), "Test");
            window.Closed += new EventHandler(OnClose);

            // Load a sprite
            Texture texture = new Texture("cute_sprite.jpg");
            Sprite sprite = new Sprite(texture);

            // create a string
            Font terminalscope = new Font("terminalscope.ttf");
            Text text = new Text("This is a test of font in front of a sprite", terminalscope);
            text.Color = new Color(0, 0, 0, 255);
       
            // run as long as the window is open
            while (window.IsOpen())
            {
                // check all triggered events since last iteration
                window.DispatchEvents();
               
                // clear screen
                window.Clear();

                // draw sprite
                window.Draw(sprite);

                // draw text
                window.Draw(text);

                // update window
                window.Display();
            }
        }

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Laurent]

Nice, thank you

[Laurent]

I can disable antialiasing easily, here is the result:


You can see that it's not perfect. I don't know if this can be improved easily, it would probably require sub-pixel adjustments.

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[binary1248]

I can disable antialiasing easily

Did you achieve this through modification of the SFML source or usage of the public interfaces? I don't see how the second option is even possible because of this. Font smoothing can get annoying if it is not disable-able and you have an idea of what you want to do e.g. disable blending and still have text work purely with alpha testing. Sure this might be a niche case like all the other cases you might know me for, but many features already part of the SFML interface are of exactly the same caliber (like sf::Texture::setSmooth(...) ). They are nice to have but don't really find their place except in special cases.

Because disabling font anti-aliasing actually has valid use cases e.g. when you want to apply FSAA anyway, it would be nice to have some sort of sf::Font::setSmooth( bool smooth ) or sf::Font::Font( bool smooth ) that utilizes FT_RENDER_MODE_MONO for rendering.

[Laurent]

Yes, I meant that I changed to FT_RENDER_MODE_MONO internally.

I understand your arguments, and I more or less agree, but exposing this feature is more complicated than, for example, Texture::setSmooth, because:

1. It cannot be applied after the glyph has been loaded, so it would be an argument of the loadFromXxx functions; I could probably live with though.

2. The result is not very good, so I have to investigate other rendering options (probably sub-pixel rendering and font hinting); some of these options might not be patent-free.

I'll add an issue to the tracker so that it can be discussed further and investgated in a future version.

[nitram_cero]

Even if only when loading the font (loadFrom* functions) you could add an optional parameter to customize this behaviour.

If needed to toggle between two modes, just use different sf::Font objects with the same font file but different options.

Regards

[Askr]

I can disable antialiasing easily

Sorry, but I'm unaware of how you did that. Could you please elaborate? I'm using SFML.net if that's of any importance here, btw.

[Laurent]

Sorry, but I'm unaware of how you did that. Could you please elaborate?

I made an internal modification directly in the SFML sources. Sorry if it was not clear.

If you want to do it yourself and recompile everything, binary1248 gave a link to the source file and line that must be modified.

[Askr]

Ah, I see! Thanks for clarification.
I'll look into recompiling everything, but not right now. I'm fine for now, knowing it is possible.