Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Flash does anti-aliasing

Author:Joe Beda
Posted:1/22/2000; 10:15:29 AM
Topic:Flash in Manilla?
Msg #:14719 (In response to 14709)
Prev/Next:14718 / 14720

Flash is cool, but in some ways it is very limited. Can you actually select text to do copy/paste? What will your printing story be? Will you be able to "view source..."? Can you do a "Find on page"?

These are things that you take for granted that you will be giving up for a little bit of anti-aliased text. Flash does so much more, but integrating that into the system will be much harder -- look at how difficult it is to seamlessly add a little dynamic HTML content.

On top of that, MSIE in Windows already has anti-aliased text. This is only above a certain size. I remember hearing usability talks that under certain point sizes the text actually gets less readable and appears blurry. It is actually the font author that specifies this in a table in the TTF (http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/ttalias.htm). It sounds like what you really want is ClearType (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/).

Flash is cool, but it looks like you might loose more than you gain in this situation.

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