Editing Font rasterization (section)

== Types of rasterization ==
The simplest form of rasterization is simple line-drawing with no anti-aliasing of any kind. In Microsoft's terminology, this is called ''bi-level'' (and more popularly "black and white") rendering because no intermediate shades (of gray) are used to draw the glyphs. (In fact, any two colors can be used as foreground and background.)<Ref name="win7"/> This form of rendering is also called aliased or "jagged".<ref name="ie9"/> This is the fastest rendering method in the sense that it requires the least computational effort.  However, it has the disadvantage that rendered glyphs may lose definition and become hard to recognize at small sizes. Therefore, many font data files (such as TrueType) contain [[hinting|hints]] that help the rasterizer decide where to render pixels for particularly troublesome areas in the glyphs, or sets of hand-tweaked bitmaps to use at specific pixel sizes.<Ref name="win7">Greg Hitchcock (with introduction by [[Steven Sinofsky]]) "[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/06/23/engineering-changes-to-cleartype-in-windows-7.aspx Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7]", MSDN blogs, 23 Jun 2009</ref> As a prototypical example, all versions of [[Microsoft Windows]] prior to [[Windows 95]] (e.g. [[Windows 3.1]]) only provided this type of built-in rasterizer.<ref name="ie9">[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh237264(v=vs.85).aspx#rendering_types About Text Rendering in Windows Internet Explorer 9]</ref>
<!-- Deleted image removed: [[Image:Textsamples.PNG|thumb|left|Aliased, grayscale anti-aliased, and ClearType subpixel anti-aliased renderings.]] -->
{{multiple image
| align             = right
| direction         = horizontal
| total_width       = 
| image1            = Rasterization-simple.png
| caption1          = Simple rasterization without anti-aliasing
| image2            = Rasterization-antialiasing-without-hinting-2.png
| caption2          = Rasterization with anti-aliasing without hinting
| image3            = Rasterization-antialiasing.png
| caption3          = Rasterization with anti-aliasing with hinting. Here pixels are forced to fall into integral pixel coordinates whenever possible.
| image4            = Rasterization-subpixel-RGB.png
| caption4          = Rasterization with hinting and subpixel rendering for an RGB flat panel display
}}
A more complicated approach is to use standard anti-aliasing techniques from computer graphics.  This can be thought of as determining, for each pixel at the edges of the character, how much of that pixel the character occupies, and drawing that pixel with that degree of opacity. For example, when drawing a black (000000) letter on a white (FFFFFF) background, if a pixel ideally should be half filled (perhaps by a diagonal line from corner to corner) it is drawn 50% gray (BCBCBC). Over-simple application of this procedure can produce blurry glyphs. For example, if the letter includes a vertical line that should be one pixel wide but falls exactly between two pixels, it appears on screen as a two-pixel-wide gray line. This blurriness trades clarity for accuracy. However, modern systems often force lines to fall within integral pixel coordinates, which makes glyphs look sharper, but also makes lines slightly wider or thinner than they would have looked on a printed sheet of paper.

[[Image:Subpixel-rendering-RGB.png|thumb|right|300px|Detail of subpixel rendering, showing positions of individual color pixels that make up white font]]

Most computer displays have pixels made up of multiple subpixels (typically one each for red, green, and blue, which are combined to produce the full range of colours).  In some cases, particularly with flat panel displays, it is possible to exploit this by rendering at the subpixel resolution rather than using whole pixels, which can increase the effective resolution of the screen.  This is generally known as [[subpixel rendering]]. One proprietary implementation of subpixel rendering is Microsoft's [[ClearType]].