Creative Docs .NET

Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari for Windows XP and Vista at this year's WWDC. This brings a few new pieces of Apple technology to the PC, in particular the font rendering which is used in Mac OS X. This produced quite a few interesting reactions (read Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror and Joel on Software), since Apple is using high quality sub-pixel glyph positioning.

High quality sub-pixel positioning is not compatible with crisp and pixel aligned character stems, which is the base for Microsoft's ClearType technology. Yes, I agree, Apple fonts look more blurry when compared to those rendered by Microsoft, but it cannot be avoided if you want to respect the font shape at any (possibly fractional) font size.

In Creative Docs .NET, I chose the same route as Apple: make sure that characters get positioned in the most precise way. However, my rendering algorithm simply relies on path filling as implemented by agg. I don't have access to the more subtle RGB smoothing used by both ClearType and Apple's font engine.

I finally found the time to build a public release of Version 2.1.0. There are plenty of small improvements:

• The full user interface is now available in German (thanks to Thomas Efer who translated the tons of texts found in Creative Docs .NET). If your Windows Regional and Language Settings are set to German, you will automatically benefit from the translation.
  


• The image export filter is now much richer: you can specify if you want to export the full page, the area covered by the graphic objects (fit to objects) or only the area covered by the active selection (fit to selection). You no longer have to rely on an external bitmap editing tool to crop the image.
  
  
  


• The polygon object has now additional properties which can be used to produce various effects:
  
  
  

Aditionally, there were a few bug fixes. Please continue to report them to bugs at creativedocs.net.