2. When printing a sprite, it tends to look more pixely than printing the same image from a PC.

Why is this and what can be done to solve these problems? These differences apply using the same resolutions and monitors etc on both machines.

Is this down to the Acorn still assuming everyone has crappy old A5000 monitors? I read something about pixel stretching to create sharp displays on crap monitors. Someone also mentioned the Pee Cee having a display res. of 72dpi and the RiscPC using 96dpi (as does the Mac). Can't say I understand this. I thought a pixel was a pixel and so 1024x768 on an Acorn and a PC would be the same!

I hope I don't have to resort to buying a Pee Cee and using it in tandem with the RiscPC. That would be annoying! Any explanations appreciated.

1. Using Paint Shop Pro on the PC, anti-aliased text is very much sharper and smoother than on the Acorn using, say, Photodesk.

Surprising. Have you turned on sub-pixel antialiasing in RISC OS? Does that improve matters?
Photodesk simply uses the standard RISC OS font displayer to render its text. It could well be that PainShopPro, just as Vantage, uses a specially optimised antialisaing that wouldn't be fast enough for display of all text on the screen, but is high quality for use in drawing apps.

2. When printing a sprite, it tends to look more pixely than printing the same image from a PC.

At a guess, the disparity here is down to poorer printer drivers for RISC OS. A driver that isn't taking full advantage of your printers special features that may increase print quality.

Why is this and what can be done to solve these problems?

At a guess, the disparity here is down to poorer printer drivers for RISC OS. A driver that isn't taking full advantage of your printers special features that may increase print quality.

I have printed documents including sprites by creating PDF files and printing from a PC (with the latest A3 deskjet from HP) so it's not printer drivers.

I don't follow you. By printing from a PC, you use the PC printer drivers. I'm saying the PC printer drivers are better than the RISC OS ones.
The comparison would be to compare the printed output of that PDF printed from RISC OS and Windows.

[quoteI have printed documents including sprites by creating PDF files and printing from a PC (with the latest A3 deskjet from HP) so it's not printer drivers.

I don't follow you. By printing from a PC, you use the PC printer drivers. I'm saying the PC printer drivers are better than the RISC OS ones.
The comparison would be to compare the printed output of that PDF printed from RISC OS and Windows.
If the difference between sprites and windoze bitmaps is noticeably when printing on a PC, then it can't be down to printer drivers, is the point I am making. Do you see what I mean?

Seems to be that the anti-aliasing problem would be better solved with an improved version of the font manager

That's the mistake I made when I read the first post... anti-aliasing applies to drawn lines and images pasted in. It applies to just about every effect infact. Someone improving the font manager won't help most of the quality issues in Photodesk.

But of course, it would be nice to have a new font manager.

I have printed documents including sprites by creating PDF files and printing from a PC (with the latest A3 deskjet from HP) so it's not printer drivers.

When PC's create PDF's, they use a 'PDF printer' driver to print to file. The printer driver will optimise the sprite as selected for screen, PC printer or typesetting quality.

If the RiscOS PDF creator prints a dodgy, poorly-optimised sprite rendering to the PDF, then the PC will faithfully print out that dodgy rendering.

But I don't know if your RiscOS app does work anything like the same way as PC's.

[Edited by guy at 13:15, 11/7/2001]

Surprising. Have you turned on sub-pixel antialiasing in RISC OS? Does that improve matters?
Photodesk simply uses the standard RISC OS font displayer to render its text. It could well be that PainShopPro, just as Vantage, uses a specially optimised antialisaing that wouldn't be fast enough for display of all text on the screen, but is high quality for use in drawing apps.

I believe this is the case - PSP does use an optimised anti-aliasing engine. The results are rather impressive.

Is Photodesk still being developed? Maybe it's time for it to have it's own font anti-aliasing. Some anti-aliasing goes too far eg you can have a straight, black line and it will add a grey line above it which with modern monitors is no longer necessary. Looks great on an old monitor, not so hot on a .24 Trinitron!

At a guess, the disparity here is down to poorer printer drivers for RISC OS. A driver that isn't taking full advantage of your printers special features that may increase print quality.

Very little I expect. Hopefully someone will reply with the solution though...

Thanks for the reply.

And to answer your earlier question, Photodesk is still in development, but after fraud problems and resulting lack of staff, it may be slower than it has been in the past...

It's the general case that any effect in Photodesk is slightly inferior to the same effect in, say, Photoshop. I suspect this is because they had to use fast as opposed to high quality algorithms to get any form of usability out of an ARM 6. To fix the quality issue they'd have to rewrite the whole render engine and redo every effect algorithm.
Still, I find the general quality good enough, though I agree with you on the antialising problem.

That's the mistake I made when I read the first post... anti-aliasing applies to drawn lines and images pasted in. It applies to just about every effect infact. Someone improving the font manager won't help most of the quality issues in Photodesk.

And the third (Michael's second) post

But of course, it would be nice to have a new font manager.

Certainly would.

If general rendering is a problem then I'm not convinced that specific solutions are best - afterall RISC OS has always made extremely good use of shared resources. Imagine if Cerilica did a deal with RISC OS Ltd to replace the Draw renderer with the one from Vantage (perhaps with some tweaks to allow images to be displayed without limiting the colours to a set printer) or if there was a general renderer that PhotoDesk and other software could use.

Yummy!!!

And the third (Michael's second) post

OK, feeling thick! What do you mean?

Certainly would.

If general rendering is a problem then I'm not convinced that specific solutions are best - afterall RISC OS has always made extremely good use of shared resources. Imagine if Cerilica did a deal with RISC OS Ltd to replace the Draw renderer with the one from Vantage (perhaps with some tweaks to allow images to be displayed without limiting the colours to a set printer) or if there was a general renderer that PhotoDesk and other software could use.

Yummy!!!

This sounds nice. The Vantage anti-aliasing technology being part of desktop RISC OS would be quite groovy

Maybe Photodesk will work on more advanced anti-aliasing. Automatic shape creation would be useful, too, for us lazy people. There's a huge range of predefined shapes in PSP, for example, which can be useful for knocking up Web graphics.

And the third (Michael's second) post

OK, feeling thick! What do you mean?

And I quote

Is Photodesk still being developed? Maybe it's time for it to have it's own font anti-aliasing.