MinGW AlphaBlend

[Kotlov]

Why not use TrueType fonts?

[hgm]

WinBoard already can do that. But there is no anti-aliasing during their rendering. Are there more modern routines that do render TrueType fonts with anti-aliasing? If so, that would make a great improvement to.

[kbhearn]

I had thought truetype fonts had antialiasing by default - so i went to do some reading. This article seems to give a good overview on font rendering technology.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/0 ... rendering/

Short version:

antialiased truetype has been around since windows xp at least with rendering in grayscale mode which works acceptably for large font sizes

cleartype became the default rendering method in windows vista - this only provides horizontal antialiasing and large font sizes have jaggies

directwrite is the current modern technology to replace GDI and does a good job of antialiasing in both directions and works with postscript fonts as well

[jdart]

Arasan uses TrueType fonts but the problem is not only anti-aliasing but also rendering them as Black or White colors on a (possibly) colored background - I have not found a good way to do that.

Many of the freeware GUIs now use vector graphics, in particular SVG, which seems to be a reasonable choice, although Windows has no native SVG support that I am aware of, so you need 3rd party code such as Cairo.

--Jon

[JoshPettus]

Well cairo AFIK requires gtk so now you are in compiling xboard for windows territory.

[Dann Corbit]

https://github.com/behdad/glyphy
Glyphy is really interesting. Runs smooth and fast on GPU cards.
There are videos about it. I made it work on a PC some time ago.

[hgm]

Arasan uses TrueType fonts but the problem is not only anti-aliasing but also rendering them as Black or White colors on a (possibly) colored background - I have not found a good way to do that.

Allesandro Scotti added the code for doing TrueType Chess fonts in WinBoard, and this could very well have predated Win XP. OTOH, his choice to use pure black and white might have been intentionally, to solve the coloring problem. What he did is render the glyphs on a background of the desired color for the inside of the pieces, and then flood-fill the outside from the corners with the desired background.

Flood-filling works poorly on anti-aliased edges. In addition, if the glyph is rendered very small, the impression of thin lines will be created by dashing/dotting them. So the outlines will no longer be 'air tight', and the flood fill of the outside will leak into the inside, effectively making the piece transparent.

So we would need a better algorithm. One approch could be to render the glyph both on a backround for the inside and for the outside, and then somehow construct an all-or-nothing mask that selects one or the other. In the hope that the ragged boundary of this mask falls completely in the black outline of the piece, which should be pure black in both images (if the outline is thick enough).

It would be nice if this mask could be made by flood-filling the glyph for the black piece from the outside; black pieces are usually solid, so nothing can leak in. Unfortunately black pieces do not always have exactly the same shape as white pieces, in Chess fonts, though.

[Kotlov]

. Unfortunately black pieces do not always have exactly the same shape as white pieces, in Chess fonts, though.

It solved the superposition of two picturels on one another (lower mask and the main picture).
Most chess fonts present this mask.

[Patrice Duhamel]

Are there more modern routines that do render TrueType fonts with anti-aliasing? If so, that would make a great improvement to.

Freetype library is a good choice to render texts, with anti aliasing.

https://www.freetype.org/

[Evert]

Well cairo AFIK requires gtk so now you are in compiling xboard for windows territory.

Does it?
It's certainly bundled with gtk, and most tutorials assume you want to combine them. However, you can also use Cairo with plain XLib and with Qt, so it seems gtk is not required.
Of course that doesn't imply you can use it directly on Windows...