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Author Topic: Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts  (Read 1216 times)

Daydream

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Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts
« on: November 01, 2009, 08:20:13 pm »

1) Are the fonts anti-aliased? Just to a degree maybe...? I think I've read something about this way back but can't find that thread. I can surely see the aliasing effect, and while using a TV kind of blurs everything together, the problem gets worse if one wants to use other fonts not Tahoma.

2) Is there a minor problem with the Obisidian skin (and I guess anything based on it)? Please check the screenshot below, that corner is wrong.



Does something happen when MenuBackground.png and ListSelection.png get overlayed? Or it might just be me and my magnifying glass :).

3) Themes and skins. Maybe in the foreseeable future these should be united for the sake of consistency and ease of distribution? I can see that the online content idea makes themes somewhat 'independent', but there are a couple of key design components that will better use local resources (home page bkg and the likes). Each skin with it's own theme(s) - subfolders in the skin folder - something like that. So a skin can be packed with everything that represents a design idea, as opposed to drop folders and files in Skin folder, file and folders in Theme folder and remember to sync them.
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raym

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Re: Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts
« Reply #1 on: November 03, 2009, 12:33:42 am »

Re: "1) Are the fonts anti-aliased?". My understanding is that Theater View makes use of the system-wide setting for "font-smoothing" - ie, "ClearType" or "Standard" as specified by Display Properties > Appearance > Effects... in XP. Might be different in Vista/Win7.
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Daydream

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Re: Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts
« Reply #2 on: November 03, 2009, 01:54:33 am »

Theater View is D3D. Does it (still) apply? The thing is I'm not seeing the smoothing; rendering in, say, Word 2007 is different, even if I discard the small differences in font metrics. I can definitely see the stair-stepping in MC - top and bottom of C, p, s letters below.



Also can't really spot a difference between a DirectX 10 card on my Win7 setup and my old laptop running XP on an Ati Xpress200m, regardless of hardware rendering setting in MC (if they would influence this to any degree), Ati driver settings, etc.
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Daydream

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Re: Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts
« Reply #3 on: November 10, 2009, 02:55:12 pm »

More about the Theater View skins.

Can we have them entirely self-sufficient, isolated? Currently all skins are sharing both graphical elements (\Theater View\Shared) and code (the Base x.xml files). If I create a skin (foreshadowing :)) and change something on any of those, it will affect all the skins that a user will use. If I change the scroll handles, they get changed everywhere even if they only fit with the design of one skin not all of them. It gets even more complicated when you want to move a skin, or give it to somebody or a new install is done over an older one, etc.
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gappie

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Re: Theatre View - a few questions and thoughts
« Reply #4 on: November 10, 2009, 04:47:20 pm »

you can copy the items you want to use in your own skin from the base xml into the xml from your own skin, mc first reads the xml from yom your own skin then the base, when something is defined in your own skin it would not look for it in the base. that way you can also change the links to the graphical elements.

 :)
gab
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