In-Reply-To: <4342E209.2050006@yahoo.com.au> mw8329@yahoo.com.au (Martin Wille) wrote (abridged):

Did you look at the examples on the antigrain.com website? They show that with good anti-aliasing and with subpixel accuracy you get very good results even when the display resolution is lower than the resolutions of the details of the displayed objects. The spirals at http://tinyurl.com/836fe look pretty impressive, IMHO.

I hadn't (but have now). I already knew about anti-aliasing, though. I work in desktop publishing. My employers have their own graphics library which uses subpixel accuracy and anti-aliasing. I didn't design it but I work on and with it. It seems roughly similar in functionality to the AGG project, except that we place a lot of importance on text and vectors and I can't find text mentioned on their manual page. We find that for sending output to printer or PDF or whatever, it's important to output text as text as much as possible and only output as bitmaps for features the target device doesn't support. Anyway, yes, anti-aliasing helps, and is the only way to deal with curves, but grid-fitting gives better results where possible. As Stefan Seefeld says later, we can't hide the pixels completely. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK.