[cairo] Write ups on Microsoft Avalon

[Peter Dennis Bartok]

[...]
>> [1], to draw something without antialiasing, once you suggested me to
>> do it pixel by pixel manually. Sorry, I could not give it a try yet,
>> but would try it sometime once I'm done with other things.
>
>Heh, I didn't seriously intend for you to implement that. What I meant
>was that the only way I could think of to achieve the effect of
>pixelized rendering in cairo would be to carefully construct a path that
>outlined each pixel. That would be quite slow to render, and it would
>ugly be design. I can't imagine that would be a useful exercise.
>
>The question to ask yourself is what you really want. If you are
>implementing a pixel-perfect specification that demands that result,
>then that may be the kind of approach you would have to take.

There are a few situations where the ability to 'turn off anti-aliasing'
is required. For example, when drawing fonts smaller than a certain size,
in order to keep it actually readable and not 'smudged' it is important.
I'm working on Mono (SWF) and one of the sample apps I use brings this
difference out quite strong, when I compare the output of MS with the
output of Mono through Cairo, the Mono version is much harder to read with
a 6pt font.

Also, for situations like drawing a Hotkey marker or an underline for
text, anti-aliasing is really defeating the purpose, it simply will look
off if you have a blurry line underlining the hotkey character or the text
line.

Cheers,
  Peter