Pixellated text issue

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Offline Mel

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Pixellated text issue
« on: December 04, 2013, 03:45:59 AM »
Hi,

Hopefully someone can help. I've been doing templates for a 6-screen (double-sided) digital signage display that uses MagicInfo-i Premium.

I'm having an issue with the way text elements display onscreen. When looking at them both in the Author and onscreen, text elements look really pixellated and crunchy.

I am using a custom font, but it has been installed on all the clients and is displaying correctly apart from the pixellation. Even when I switched back to a default font (Arial), the text still looked just as crunchy.

Everything is set up to the correct resolution, and I can't find any options in the Author that can fix it. I also can't find anyone else complaining about it on the net - which is odd.

I've attached an image to show what it looks like - this is a screencap taken from the Author, and it looks worse than that when onscreen. See how there's all this edging around the orange and grey letters? On the actual screen, the white text looks worse than in this image. I just want the text to look smooth - it's such a shame with such nice-looking screens.

Does anyone know what this could be? I feel like there's got to be something - feels like anti-aliasing or smoothing needs to be turned on or something.

Or am I just being picky and this is the way text is meant to look?

Would love to know if anyone has any thoughts!

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Offline 460FPN2

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2013, 08:48:40 PM »
I'm not sure this will help but you could try upgrading to the new version of Author (2.0).
What model is your TV?

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Offline Mel

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2013, 09:41:44 PM »
Thanks for replying.

I have the new version of Author. Also, I'm not sure what model the TVs are, I wasn't involved with the hardware setup.

However, I've seen the crunchy text issue on two completely different computers as well as on the screens themselves, so it's a reproducible issue. To me, this seems to point to a software problem rather than a hardware problem, but I could be wrong.

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Offline 460FPN2

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #3 on: December 12, 2013, 07:29:07 PM »
Mine does not look like that. I took some pics, I will attach them later when I get time.
I have ME40C TV with SBB-CD7 using arial font
(It is suggested in the samsung TV manual not to use gray as a background though as it can cause burn-in. also contrasting colors)

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Offline 460FPN2

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #4 on: December 12, 2013, 08:54:51 PM »
I have attached a pic I took of my TV from my iPhone using the same-ish colors

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Offline Mel

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #5 on: December 12, 2013, 11:02:28 PM »
Thanks for that. Of course the client had to request orange text over a dark grey background...

I handed my files over to Samsung and they had two suggestions, neither of them worked:
- Enabling ClearType
- Testing the fonts in Wordpad

They seemed to think that it was the custom font that was the problem because Arial looked fine for them, but I don't think that's the problem, since I already tested it and it had the same issue.

I'm thinking that I'm probably going to have to adjust the colours to try to make it look a bit better, but apart from that I'm not sure what else can be done to resolve this.

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Offline 460FPN2

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Re: Pixellated text issue
« Reply #6 on: March 03, 2014, 07:26:00 PM »
sorry for the late reply, not sure if you will ever see this but I was just looking at the settings in Windows 7 and there is a text smoothing option. Control panel> system> advanced system settings > Performance settings> click the checkbox for smooth edges of screen fonts.