XWidgetSoft Forum

Is there some type of setting to adjust the amount or type of anti-aliasing used for text in XWidget? I am piecing together an XWidget skin from a Rainmeter one, and using the same exact font, font weight/style, color, size, etc., the two (Rainmeter and XWidget) display the fonts differently. They look much cleaner when Rainmeter displays the text, but the same text displayed in XWidget looks slightly more blurry.

Any ideas?

There is an option to enable anti-aliasing in font settings.

Check Anti-alias under Font in object properties.

However, Rainmeter uses D2D to do rendering, whereas, XWidget still uses GDI+ (See for an explanation). D2D has an added convenience of device-independent pixels, the and in RM, as I've noticed, the base resolution is somewhat 72 dpi, as opposed to XWidgets' 96 dpi. So, a 10px font will match to something about 12 px in XWidget. So the Anti-aliasing done here can never match that of RM.

This is just a reference, I haven't been to RM, for years and have to scuffle with the docs to give you a measure.
Good Luck, looking foreword to see your widgets!


Since, texts are vectors, It should not be much difference, let me dig out what XWidget does behind-the-scenes... and if someting is missing, I put a feature request

_________________
Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

Thanks for the info, digigamer! The main reason I stay away from using RM is because of the lack of a GUI/WYSIWYG editor. I've used Samurize for years, but I am now trying out XWidget to see if I can switch over to something that is actively being developed.

I understand that there shouldn't be much of a difference, and maybe it's just my detail-oriented eyes, but the difference is quite obvious to me. I'll take a screenshot for comparison and post it here.

Screenshots for comparison (XWidget on left, Rainmeter on right):

In the following screenshot, the text is the same fontsize between XWidget and Rainmeter:


In this next screenshot, I increased XWidget's fontsizes to approximate the same size appearance as Rainmeter's display:


Especially in the month text, you can see how RM is displaying it more clearly than XW. Anti-aliasing IS checked on both, and unchecking it makes things worse.

Is there anything I can do about this, or is this something hard-coded into XWidget's software that I cannot change?

I don't know about RM, but XWidget designer has a lot of options/effects/modes that can be used for txts. So you can't compare and be objective with just a clean txt and only with "Anti-aliasing" on.
Trust me!

_________________
...and remember: don't take life too seriously...
My profile on Deviantart: http://jimking.deviantart.com/

1) If you take a closer look on the XWDesigner you will see that you have a lot of default options and modes, and with various combinations will give you a LOT of possibilities. You need some practice and play with the values to see the real potencial.
2) After all the widgets that I made I can tell you for sure that the quality of the txt and the anti-aliasing depends a LOT on the quality of the font itself! Not all fonts are made "well" with high dpi, so on bigger sizes looks ugly. You can play a little with the shadow,angle and softness to make a font appear "cleaner". The anti-aliasing is on from default.
As I told you, it needs some practice and play with the values to see the real potencial and the results.

_________________
...and remember: don't take life too seriously...
My profile on Deviantart: http://jimking.deviantart.com/

Thank you very much for your help, jimking. I'll play around with the options and see what I can do.

_________________
Life is a myriad game... Just play it!