Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
The text display isn't anti-aliased, which combined with the very bright screen gives quite noticeable pixel edges.
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It is anti-aliased (in the same manner as text usually gets anti-aliased on the iPhone). But there are a couple gotchas on Apple's approach as far as I can tell:
1) Putting text on an OpenGL 3D surface has always been slightly problematic. Anti-aliasing assumes a 1:1 mapping of pixels, which isn't true in OpenGL, so you can get slight "off by a fraction of a pixel" errors which causes OpenGL to sample your rendered text and anti-alias it again, which produces even more oddities. Or if you turn off the texture AA (or it isn't available), the lack of a 1:1 mapping actually undoes some of the anti-aliasing you did when rendering the text, hardening the otherwise soft edges.
2) Apple's anti-aliasing, while it does a good job of being faithful to the typeface versus being "crisp" (like ClearType on Windows attempts to do), works best on high-DPI screens. Otherwise you get text that may appear smudged, or slightly fuzzy. The DPI on the iPad screen (130 DPI) is much lower than the current crop of e-ink screens or the iPhone (160+ DPI).
These two things conspire to make the text look worse than it needs to be.