EzDevInfo.com

Does subpixel rendering technology such as ClearType have any effect on CRT displays?

If I understood correctly, subpixel rendering was originally designed to improved anti-aliasing of text on LCD screens. It makes use of the fact that each pixel on a color LCD is actually a bunch of individual red, green, and blue subpixels and does some magic with them to make text sharper. The physical properties of a CRT display is quite different. So, does subpixel rendering still work on CRT displays?

What causes the Windows XP lagscreen render fail?

We all know the situation when a program or the OS itself froze and the only thing you can do is paint with the millions of dialogs that the system renders. I am talking about this (demo here):

Why does this happen? And why do I always meet with it only on Windows XP? Doesn't this occur on Linux, Mac or other Windows versions? If not, why? Actually, does this bug has an official/common name at all?

Rendering MS PowerPoint documents properly in LibreOffice Impress

When I open ppt files in LibreOffice Impress the format is not the same as in MS PowerPoint. The images and the text are not properly aligned.

Are there any tips on how to open MS PowerPoint documents so that that they are rendered properly in LibreOffice Impress?

A scripting language for videos

I'm searching for a way to to create a video sequence with something like a scripting language.

The goal is to automate the process of generating a script which describes something like:

place video x at 0,0
place picture y at 4,4
move y to 0,0 in 4sec
...

In the next step I would like to render the video with such a script. Is the any system for such a task?

What alternative browser rendering engines exist for Linux/UNIX?

Now that Opera has switched to WebKit too, on Linux I found only WebKit or Gecko based browsers. The only other one was KDE/Konqueror's KHTML and on Windows IE's Trident. Are there any other alternatives to WebKit and Gecko on Linux?

How does a computer render an object to the screen?

Are all computer graphics rendered using polygons? What I mean is, some computer geometries are mathematically represented in the form of equations (for example, CAD software).

Does the computer first have to tessellate those geometries before it can properly render the visualization to screen or are there other methods of getting the picture to the screen without having to tessellate an object?

Edit: I guess more specifically focused on the GPU. How dose the GPU do it? what kind of inputs dose it require, ie, what model formats dose the GPU work with? can it use a perfect mathematical representation directly or dose it tessellate the model itself before actually rendering to screen or dose the GPU require a tessellated model to begin with.

Also, what i mean by tessellation is the way a computer breaks down a mathematical representation of an object into a surface approximation of polygons (almost always triangles). The more polygons used, the closer the surface is to the actual object.

Alternative to povray?

I need a raytracer, but I have some trouble with povray. is there a free, cross platform alternative which accepts a simple subset of povray syntax ? need to run it from command line. no graphics.

Fonts in PDF files: How do I ensure that a font will render properly across platforms/readers?

I created a document in MS Word (2007) and then published to PDF with the intention of creating a document that looks the same regardless of platform or pdf reader choice.

It looks fine on a couple of windows machines, but when I open it in ubuntu (using acroread) the original font, arial, gets replaced with some ridiculous frilly font that is totally inappropriate.

This has me worried that this document might have its font rendered in some crazy random way depending on whatever the recipient is using to open it.

Questions:

1. I don't understand how fonts work in pdf but I've heard about "embedding" fonts in the pdf. Does this ensure that whatever font I choose will be rendered the same way always? If so, how do I do it?

2. Is there an alternative sure-fire way to generate a simple pdf whose fonts "behave" properly? I'm not tied to any particular tool like MS Word. My paramount concern is that the pdf document looks the way I intend it to look.

Is there a way to render LaTEX/MathJax for Slack Chatting client (web or app)?

I have a workgroup that uses the Slack chatting app/website/destop version to communicate, and the desire to send usable mathematical expressions across to friends is something we'd like to do there. While it doesnt seem like there is any official implementation of LaTeX or a plugin for it there are many ways for DIY integration:

I wanted to know how to get LaTeX rendering working on Slack, be it through integrations and/or customization of Slack and/or through web hooking. The only thing I'd prefer not to do is hook out to another website, make the render into a picture, and then hook it back into Slack.

Why is rendering multibyte character sequences unbelievably slow?

About a week ago I realized that the file list in µTorrent would hang for less than a second whenever a file with a long Japanese file name was visible. I found it curious, but I didn't really have time to worry about it at the time, especially since it was only limited to µTorrent.

However, today I realized that it is not. If I for example save a text file with a long multibyte character file name and open it in Notepad, I get some strange results. When I try to resize the window, everything slows to a crawl. I can however release my grip on the window and see how my cursor splits in two, one being controlled by me and the other being a sort of "ghost cursor" for lack of a better word that executes the dragging motion I originally made with the mouse. This only applies to filenames of this nature, and I have tested it in applications other than Notepad and µTorrent as well.

I've tried searching for clues as to what is causing this strange behavior, but I cannot find anything. Does anyone here have any idea what's going on?

Unfortunately, I cannot take a screenshot of this as it seems like all screenshot applications hang until the resizing is complete before taking the shot...

Edit: I've recorded a video demonstrating the problem. I'm not sure whether this will help in identifying the cause but it should at least be better than my explanation above:

https://vimeo.com/58619918

Edit 2: Here's a sample file as requested: Note that it's simply an empty file with a long multibyte filename: http://goo.gl/bgnGP (And for those of you with a browser which can't handle the filename, here's a zip-file: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/55495248/multibyte.zip)

Professional graphics cards a "must" for rendering static environments?

I'm not sure if the title is clear but with more words what I want to say is: I'm building a PC for a decorator who's main work is to render photorealistic images of house interiors. For that she uses 3dsMax and AutoCAD with Accurender and Photoshop.

Is there a need for professional graphics card like Quadro series or FireGL series? Do these cards offer any improvements on rendering time or are they only used for real time rendering?

Cause for bad font rendering in Chrome?

I notice that the text on some web pages look bad when viewed in Chrome (16.0.912.77 m) while OK with Firefox (10.0). FWIW, I'm using the Windows versions of those applications, with default settings.

As an (ironic) example, www.google.com/webfonts.

Does someone know why that is, and if something can be done about it?

Thank you.

Edit: Another example:

Edit: Here's how it looks in FireFox:

How to get Apple font rendering on Windows (XP)?

No, I am not trying to start a flame war. :-)

I understand, that this is purely matter of taste. Both Joel & Jeff have stated their opinions on the matter. I for one love the way the Mac displays fonts and whenever trying to read a longer text on my PC I get frustrated and employ a hack:

• print it into OneNote - apparently the act of printing it changes the algorithm used and the resulting picture has a much better look (makes kind of sense due to the different resolution).

What I really want is to have the Apple Font Rendering used everywhere in Windows. Currently I use the ClearType Tuning PowerToy to crank up the thickness of the font to the max, but I am not really satisfied. The above mentioned articles from Joel & Jeff explain why that is.

So basically I am looking for an alternative to ClearType. I do not mind spending money for it if it works. Any recommendations?

Google Chrome never renders fonts properly / no smoothing etc

A while ago I started using Chrome and no longer Firefox, however I found out something weird which maybe force me to return to Firefox if I can not fix this. I am coding a homepage and the output was in Chrome ugly, in Firefox not. I thought "ok this is maybe due to bad code"... however I found out that the same problems occurs on different sites like Facebook too. The font is not smoothed and it is not nice to read. Here is an example, although I have censored nearly everything...

Bad Chrome Rendering

Good Firefox Rendering

You may need to open up in a new tab to see the errors in detail. Now I want to know, whether this is just Chrome trolling me or maybe something else.

EDIT I tried it out under Ubuntu on my PC and it works well... seems to be an error on Windows/Chrome on Windows.

Chrome 37 - BGR subpixel text rendering

I am lucky to have a screen with BGR subpixel layout.

With lucky I mean that Google Chrome 37 now forced RGB subpixel rendering with their recently added DirectWrite text rendering method. Text is exhausting to read now.

Does anyone know how to force a BGR subpixel layout?