You rock Konttori, I will try this out later today. I still am stratching my head as to what was preventing me from getting your previous method to work. Oh well. I really look forward to trying this out.

again, thanks.

Beautiful Konttori, it worked like a charm! Not only that, but you chose the blue theme I enjoy best out of the 4 default themes that come with the device. You are the man, thank you very very much! I love it.

Nice to hear that!

Did you notice that the top bar is slightly different from the default blue. This allowed cool 9 pixels of vertical space for all apps.

I'm currently in the progress of making a theme creator, but it will take quite some time to get it up and running in any meaningful way.

It's widely commented, but hardly a "known fact". Mostly by people who've never seen sub-pixel antialiasing with a well-hinted font.

Really? That's news to me, I knew they contained hinting and scaffolding information, and potentially slightly different vectors for different sizes; but I've never seen a vector font containing a bitmap version to be rendered in preference.

That webpage sets up a whole series of straw-man arguments. Changing the colours of an anti-aliased font to highlight the effect destroys the effect - and results in it looking crap.

With a 225dpi screen, it's practically impossible to see the individual pixels smoothing the aliasing so it's a very subtle (and effective) technique for improving the rendering.

Cheers,

Andrew

OK, agreed, it's widely commented then As for the well-hinted fonts, yes maybe. Can you give some exaple of well-hinted font? I think at small sizes there is no such thing. IMO this is said mostly by people who never seen good bitmap font ;-) The best font at small size I've seen so far is Tahoma (default in windows XP). Also default fonts in PalmOS at 320x320 are quite good.

I've seen cleartype in windows XP. I've seen freetype in my gentoo installation with bytecode interpreter enabled and subpixel rendeding turned on. But first thing I do is to disable cleartype in XP and disable subpixel rendering in KDE or GNOME for sizes less than 12. Subpixel rendering or antialiasing looks great at bigger sizes but for small sizes it produces very pretty and very smooth but almost unreadable crap which gives me a headache after reading it for longer time. Well at least it really is a known fact that blurry edges produce more eye strain than crisp, simple shapes. Fonts in Opera on N770 at 100% is nice example of this. But true that bigger fonts are very nice indeed.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tt/sbit.htm

also see google cache, bottom of the page for nice description
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...e+bitmap+fonts
It is right there "Another area where bitmap fonts are being used is in the TrueType or OpenType format itself. It is possible to add bitmaps to TrueType fonts. More than that it is the preferred format used below sizes of 12 pt. From that point of view, bitmapping is the ultimate form of hinting."

Interesting that they shortened the article later a bit in favor of your opinion So I agree it is matter of personal opinion. My choice is readability and crisp shapes. Other people may prefer smooth looking fonts which are pretty but not so easy to the eyes.

Interesting. It says "possible", would be interesting to check my various font directories to see how many actually do provide bitmaps.

Cheers,

Andrew

I know for a fact that several of the TrueType fonts that came with my copy of OS/2 Warp 4 had bitmaps for the smaller point sizes. I don't believe Microsoft ever bothered.

I followed the directions - unzip => transfer to root on mmc1 - load xterm and execute kontori's steps. close xterm. go to personalization / themes but there is no new theme !?! only the original ones - what am i missing?