I really like the new "Smooth" setting for font creation (in Font Maker), it helps making much better looking small fonts.

Here is a comparison of the "Segoe UI" font (= Windows default GUI font) created and drawn at a size of 16 pixels in Esenthel (except for last one):


With the options I had before the smooth setting, I couldn't get the font to look anything like in windows explorer. The currently possible result comes very close however. Thanks for adding this!

But...

• As you can see on all four strings rendered by the Esenthel Engine, the font drawing is not consistent (I suppose this comes from scaling and rounding errors):
  The first four 'E's are pretty sharp, the next ones are blurred, then sharp again...
• Even if the above bug was corrected, the result still doesn't look exactly like in explorer.
  This has the following reasons:
  • The last 't' has a large offset from the rest of the text, and I don't know why. I know I can control the spacing, but not of individual characters... Why does this occur?
  • The smoothing does not use the ClearType/LCD smoothing technique which makes use of the RGB subpixels of LCD monitors to smooth the borders even more, resulting in slightly blueish-yellowish-colored pixels around the edges (zoom into the explorer rendering to see what I mean).

Do you think these things could be optimized to allow having font rendering in Esenthel engine look just like Windows' font rendering?

Does the font texture store color information? If so adding the LCD style smoothing (the one that creates the colored borders) shouldn't be difficult from a storage and drawing point of view.

Something else: About the Font Maker Tool in Editor
Could you please add a "File" menu to the Font Maker window just like the other windows in the GUI editor have (e.g. TDS Editor) and move the Save (As) option there and especially add a Load option so we can continue working on existing fonts.

it will work correct for next release

You mean it'll look like in Explorer?

Very cool, thanks!

Many thanks for the fix "-each text character is now per-pixel aligned when drawing text, which can result in better quality if text draw settings scale is set to per pixel size", it looks so much better now.

What about the ClearType/LCD smoothing? Will that make it into the engine some time too?