What is SystemText for ?
Applications like Aura, Mirage and TVPaint have powerful text tools. The generated text brushes and picture have anti-aliased edges, that make them look nice and smooth. This is very efficient for animation and video titling.
Now if you use these applications to create graphic interfaces for the internet you will see two drawbacks by using anti-aliased text :lots of colors are involved in this process and text in small font looks blurry.
With SystemText, you can create text with aliased edges that looks clear and sharp on the screen. Small and even very small fonts will be readable, not blurry. Aliased fonts use less colors and allows better compression in some file format. It will be especially efficient for web and interface design.
SystemText allows you to use the system fonts, including TrueType, OpenType and bitmap fonts.
You can turn the system font anti-aliasing on and off from the Display Properties dialog (see next section). The Anti-aliased fonts look a little bit sharper than the text coming from the applications listed above.
Aliased text
If you want aliased text, from the Display Properties dialog, you may desactivate font smoothing from the Plus! or Effects tab.
Font size
Some system font (bitmap) have only pre-defined size. It is not sure that your text will grow on each clik on the [Bigger Font] button.
Example : if a font is defined at 8 and 10 points in size, you will need to click 2 times on the [Bigger font] button from size 8 to reach size 10. After the first click, the font will not change, because size 9 is not defined.
Vector fonts (TrueType and OpenType) should accept every size.
Trucated text
If your brush contains truncated characters add several spaces at the end of the text lines and send the picture again to your application.
Truncated characters can happend if you use some style (italic) with complex or fantasy fonts.