[Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] Font Opacity

[jamescover]

I have two questions:

1). If I load a footer, Jofta's, for instance, or any swf, from my Temporary Internet files, the swf displays in full screen, so that a 300 px footer spans the whole screen, and the fonts are huge. Why is this? Are the fonts being compressed in the swi, even though a fixed point font is being used?

2). A seemingly related question, concerns the font opacity.
If you look at Jofta's footer, the fonts are very difficult to read. It appears that the opacity is less than 100%. However, when in the fullscreen display, as described above, the fonts are very legible, and 100% opaque. Why is this? And is there a way to fix this problem? (I even tried duplicating a font, placing several copies on top of one another, hoping to increase the opacity, but they still come out illegible. I use that trick in PSP, and it works great, but not is Swish.)

Thanks, in advance, for any help.



James



"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in him would not perish, but have everlasting life."

[KLTdesigns5869]

Anytime you load a .swf directly into the browser, it will expand to fill the browser window. The footers are small, which is why such the difference. If you size your browser window to 40 x 300, it should look identical.
As for the text, well, the smaller it is, the harder it is to read, with or without transparency..some fonts do better than others at small sizes too. I haven't really looked at the one you described, but viewing the .swf in the broswer is like loooking at the text at 300%, yeah, it will be easier to read.

[wcoleman]

Originally posted by jamescover
2). A seemingly related question, concerns the font opacity.
If you look at Jofta's footer, the fonts are very difficult to read. It appears that the opacity is less than 100%. However, when in the fullscreen display, as described above, the fonts are very legible, and 100% opaque. Why is this? And is there a way to fix this problem? (I even tried duplicating a font, placing several copies on top of one another, hoping to increase the opacity, but they still come out illegible. I use that trick in PSP, and it works great, but not is Swish.)

James,

The answer to your second question has to do with problems associated with small fonts. When fonts are sized to about 12 or less, they begin to look odd when anti-aliased. There are fonts, called pixel fonts, that have specifically been constructed to work at small sizes without anti-aliasing. One good source is http://www.miniml.com - also check out the thread http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...hreadid=187194

Cheers,

Flick

[jamescover]

Thanks for the response guys. And once again, my hat goes off to you WC. Those fonts look great. I downloaded several. Now, if I can only figure out how to use them. I already have over 1,000 fonts on my machine. In fact, I have so many that Windows wouldn't even accept any more, and when I use a program, like PSP, it will only load some of them. I'm not sure about how Swish handles this issue--if I can selectively load a font, or not. Maybe one of the developers can answer that question.

At any rate, thanks!


James



"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in him would not perish, but have everlasting life."

[jofta]

James, right now the footers are an exercise for me in how much bang for no more than 6k for example.
That footer had minimal fonts plus Arial for the larger words and file size went to well above 6k.
Using the same font alowed me to keep the Effect plus the number of information links, within the file size limit I set myself.
Try an exercise of a mixture of fonts then one by one convert them to a single font like Arial, and monitor the test report each time you convert back to the default.
Next one will be no animation in an attempt to use minimals and Arial and stay within a size limit.
jofta

[wcoleman]

Originally posted by jamescover
I already have over 1,000 fonts on my machine. In fact, I have so many that Windows wouldn't even accept any more, and when I use a program, like PSP, it will only load some of them. I'm not sure about how Swish handles this issue--if I can selectively load a font, or not. Maybe one of the developers can answer that question.

James,

Think about getting a font manager such as the (free) "The Font Thing" - http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/ - this is a really good tool. I would suggest that you keep no more than 300 or so fonts in your font directory. I keep about 2000 fonts in a different directory and use The Font Thing to install and uninstall as needed. More than about 300 fonts begins to affect performance dramatically, and around 1000 crashes many programs. One way that I cleaned out my fonts folder was to get rid of teh the italic, bold and bold italic options of all but the most common fonts (as you can finesse these in most programs, including PSP and Swish).

Cheers,

Flick

[jofta]

Ok James, keep it under 5 and clearer small fonts.
The other one was 5.310 k total. Using Arial slim only the fonts were 2430.
This one (no trap doors) is 4.8k but the fonts went up to 2800. The small font is Standard 07_65
The minimal fonts should be Left justified and most likely have a lot of other attention as well.
This is just an example.
Regards
jofta

[jamescover]

Hey, Jofta:

Didn't mean to pick on your footer. It's just the font thing. I'm having the same trouble myself. I like the small fonts, but they look bad. Nothing personal!


James


[Edit]
Sorry, one more thing: I JUST MADE "SENIOR MEMBER!!!" 100 POSTS!!! YIPEEE!!! [End Edit]


"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in him would not perish, but have everlasting life."
[Edited by jamescover on 09-01-2001 at 08:02 PM]