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First OS to have truly smooth font characters

Still later came Clear Type, which only works on LCD - type monitors, to smooth the appearance of the edges further using "sub-pixel rendering".
ClearType is optimized for LCDs, but works just fine on CRTs as well. Depending on the picture tube's dot pitch, it might create a slightly visible "color fringing" effect, but Microsoft also provides a "ClearType Tuner" applet which lets you reduce this effect, and optimize the sub-pixel rendering to the particular display you are using (be it LCD or CRT or anything else) and to your visual preference.
 
ClearType is optimized for LCDs, but works just fine on CRTs as well. Depending on the picture tube's dot pitch, it might create a slightly visible "color fringing" effect, but Microsoft also provides a "ClearType Tuner" applet which lets you reduce this effect, and optimize the sub-pixel rendering to the particular display you are using (be it LCD or CRT or anything else) and to your visual preference.

I think cleartype looks gross on both LCDs and CRTs. I can see the blue/red splitting on either sides of the letters. It irritates me immensely. Believe it or not, but you can get the same effect with glasses. Simply get a pair of glasses that have enough magnification, look at a piece of paper with black text, and you'll see the blue split off to one side, and the red to the other of each letter.
(one reason why I never wear my glasses: too many artifacts).
 
Believe it or not, but you can get the same effect with glasses. Simply get a pair of glasses that have enough magnification, look at a piece of paper with black text, and you'll see the blue split off to one side, and the red to the other of each letter. One reason why I never wear my glasses: too many artifacts).

It's called "chromatic aberration" and is due because the stuff in your glasses exhibits different refractive indices for differently colored light.

There have been attempts since the 1800's to incorporate special construction (doublet; use of two different glasses in each lens) in spectacles, but the result has always been bulky and hard to produce. Still if it's a problem for you, you may want to consider a high-index glass in place of the usual polycarbonate lenses.
 
I'm 99.923785% sure Chuck isn't actually human.. Either that or he possess the Intersect once again and flashed on your post.
 
Still if it's a problem for you, you may want to consider a high-index glass in place of the usual polycarbonate lenses.

In my experience (been wearing bifocals since age 5), high-index plastic makes the problem worse, not better. I only started noticing chromatic aberration *after* I got my first pair of high-index plastic lenses around age 25.

A nice side-benefit of high-index plastic lenses is their durability -- they're the same stuff that safety goggles are made of. My eye doctor only half-joked that my glasses could stop a .22 caliber shot.
 
In my experience (been wearing bifocals since age 5), high-index plastic makes the problem worse, not better. I only started noticing chromatic aberration *after* I got my first pair of high-index plastic lenses around age 25.

Jim, I didn't say "high index plastic", but "high index glass". The glasses I use for close work are made with real-honest-to-gosh-made-from-sand high-index glass and to my eyes, offer a much clearer view than plastic.

It took bucks and a couple of weeks to get them, though. Glass is a lot harder to work with than new-glasses-in-an-hour plastic garbage. So glass lenses are always sent out to one of the few labs who still grind them.
 
Some of the earliest computers used vector based displays, right? If so, I guess they had really, really smooth characters. :)
 
Some of the earliest computers used vector based displays, right? If so, I guess they had really, really smooth characters. :)

You're right. My time on a CDC 6600 (DD60/6602 console) taught me that that rounded edges don't necessarily make for better readability, just different--sort of like being drawn with a ball-point pen. An advantage of generating characters with analog circuitry is that it's easy to change the character size. It's a shame there aren't any screen displays around from that console--just photos of the console itself.

I believe the PDP-1 had a vector CRT display and it probably wasn't even close to being the first.

I also seem to remember some vector CRT-to-microfilm setups from that time.
 
I could be wrong, but IIRC from looking at some of the documentation, the PDP-1 display wasn't so much vector as "high-persistance software-driven pixel gun." But don't quote me on that.
 
Some of the earliest computers used vector based displays, right? If so, I guess they had really, really smooth characters. :)

Like you, and Chuck, my mind immediately goes to the concept of readability. I do think, however, that we're dinosaurs in even daring to consider content and the efficient communication thereof to be of any real significance. (sigh)

Nevertheless, the OP did ask about a "paper and ink" look, and the connection of that to a specific OS.

From OP:
. . . was the first to make them look like nice silky smooth calligraphy letters done with black ink on a crisp white paper? Which OS was that and which platform?

What's interesting about that idea is that it is often connected with WYSIWYG which is only correct if you're talking about the screen - in which case it is always true! However, if WYSIWYG is about what will be output to some other display, particularly a paper printer, then it is an outright lie. It can't be done.

As for great displays, I'd really like to see what Chuck is talking about. That sounds fantastic. And tingo, I agree. I've got a Toshiba T3100 (1986) with an amber plasma screen. The edges of the cells are as sharp as can be. I doubt any screen font could possibly be sharper.
 
Some of the earliest computers used vector based displays, right? If so, I guess they had really, really smooth characters. :)
I think the Tektronix 4010 series of terminals had vector graphics but still used bitmap fonts for the characters.

The HP2640 series of terminals used another approach to making smooth characters using "half-pixel positioning" to increase the effective resolution. I once had an EPSON near letter quality printer that did something similar.
 
I could be wrong, but IIRC from looking at some of the documentation, the PDP-1 display wasn't so much vector as "high-persistance software-driven pixel gun." But don't quote me on that.

It certainly wasn't raster; but each output to the thing displayed a single dot with a (stated) 4096x4096 pixel resolution. Given the technology of the day, adjacent pixels would be indistinguishable as such.

But there were many early vector graphics subsystems that displayed nicely rounded characters. Here's one for the CDC 250, but just about every major manufacturer had one.

The downside was that the more complex the display, the longer it took to paint, so that unless the programmer was smart, simple displays were brighter than complex ones. The CDC 6600 display, for example, was unbuffered and had to be repainted continuously by a dedicated PPU. If central memory access was tied up because of extended core transfers, the screen could flicker quite noticeably.
 
The earliest I've used is Mac OS 8. I'm certain that it existed in typesetting software long before that. Wikipedia says RISC OS had it in 1990, but the example images I've found for that seem to be more blur than clarification.
RiscOS 3.x certainly does. From memory Mac OS 7 wasn't too shabby either. Remember using it in a tech publication enviroment running Interleath. The basic word processing was done on Compaq 286s running dos and WordStar at the time- they where set up with yellow text on a red background and very easy to read.

There's an interesting comparison between PostScript Type 1 and True Type fonts and the OSs that supported them- http://www.truetype-typography.com/articles/ttvst1.htm

Of course you could use Adobe Type Manager (ATM) in Windows 3.0 if you wanted. Apparently ATM was bundled with NeXTSTEP and OS/2.
 
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I don't recall ever seeing anti-aliased text on System 7, but maybe it was an extension I never encountered or something.
Apple didn't start using RGB subpixel rendering (like Windows XP's "ClearType") until Mac OS X.

Previous versions may have used monochrome font smoothing (like Windows 98/2000), but I believe it was purposely set so that most of the on-screen text in menus and dialog boxes was not smoothed. The same is true of Windows 98 and 2000 (font sizes between 6 and 14 points are not smoothed), but you can hack the TrueType font files to enable font smoothing at all sizes, using a program called "TTFGASP"; for Mac OS 7.x to 9.x, you can add RGB smoothing by using the shareware program SmoothType.

Here's a small comparison between monochrome and RGB font smoothing:

i_antialias_02.gif
 
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