(snipped some parts...)
Michal Suchanek wrote:
... I intentionally did not use zooming for the comparison, only displayed the page as-is on two screens, one with the expected RGB direction and one rotated.
I see. My mistake.
The reason for crude zooming in bitmap viewers is speed I guess, few people want to wait tens of seconds for their image to show in the viewer. Also without additional information you cannot know how the image was rendered and how it should be scaled or resampled for different subpixel positions and different resolutions.
Of course.
components on the same point. My claim is that this is not true. Thinking about it like digital audio, we have "the real thing", a continuous image not made of pixels, and sampled as appropriate for the current target device. So the idea of images made of rgb pixels is dead. And for examining and editing images, no music producer works with individual samples, although in the old times all of them did work cutting and gluing magnetic tape. The same
Working with pixels directly makes sense for very small low resolution images which are more akin to ASCII-art than actual pictures. As the resolution of display devices increases and images are getting more realistic the need for such low-level manipulation decreases as well. Still the low-res images strike back in the form of font glyphs and icons for pocket devices.
Agreed.
Actually there is real a problem of converting fonts from vector outlines to some bitmap form which can be used for simple drawing operations (in this particular case for use in a bootloader which should not be concerned with rendering vector graphics).
The current method freetype uses fails miserably for conversion to b&w (not grayscale) bitmaps but maybe there is no way how that can be done reasonably. Grayscale is the next thing on the list of things to try but I have not seen the results yet.
If your software can render some CJK/Indic/whatever TrueType/OpenType/whatever font glyphs that would be another thing where good antialiasing could be useful. Rendering of Latin or such is also of use but there drawing all the bitmaps by hand is less of an issue and many bitmap fonts already exist.
Freetype does already a wonderful work there.
Thanks
Michal
Cheers, Juan Vuletich