Maptext or Screen Object Overlays?

ID:1733519
 
Dec 5 2014, 4:05 pm
(See the best response by Nadrew.)
Which one is more practical and should be used more?

What is the different if you used one completely over the other, using it for almost everything to display text?

If Maptext is the better choice, what is a way to get it to be less "pixelated"?

Dec 5 2014, 4:15 pm
Maptext is obviously going to be more efficient, and less demanding since it's plugging directly into text rendering on the client, but as you've noticed by how it looks it's a bit limited on what you can do with it.

Graphical text gives you much more flexibility over how things look because you're physically drawing the font (or generating it with DMIFonts or something). You end up creating and destroying a lot of objects (or images depending on what you're doing and how you do it), so it's going to be more demanding resource-wise.
Dec 5 2014, 4:54 pm
In response to Nadrew
Nadrew wrote:
Maptext is obviously going to be more efficient, and less demanding since it's plugging directly into text rendering on the client, but as you've noticed by how it looks it's a bit limited on what you can do with it.

Graphical text gives you much more flexibility over how things look because you're physically drawing the font (or generating it with DMIFonts or something). You end up creating and destroying a lot of objects (or images depending on what you're doing and how you do it), so it's going to be more demanding resource-wise.

So, is there any way to get a crisp looking font text at a small font size with maptext because at the rate this is going, I'm getting quite ticked and ready to call it a night.
Dec 5 2014, 5:02 pm
Best response
You could experiment with different font faces to see if any others turn out better, but I've personally never used maptext in a way where it was an obvious problem.
Dec 5 2014, 5:07 pm
Font size is 2, font type is Futurist (for testing), and first picture is without the outlines applied through procedural means.

http://i.imgur.com/Ndd8Rua.png
http://i.imgur.com/LXom5qV.png

While things work like they "should", it doesn't please me to know that the users can see the pixels of the font and that i can't get it to be readable any smaller than this.
Dec 5 2014, 10:14 pm (Edited on Dec 5 2014, 10:28 pm)
CSS can be applied to maptext in the form of an inline style to help make the font smaller, but as far as making the font anti-aliased, you'll need to use a font that will support this. By default Arial doesn't have anti-aliasing in smaller sizes. This encourages a different font to be used.

Similarly, if one would like to apply a custom font to maptext, refer to THIS POST.
Dec 6 2014, 6:45 am
In response to Mr_Goober
Mr_Goober wrote:
CSS can be applied to maptext in the form of an inline style to help make the font smaller, but as far as making the font anti-aliased, you'll need to use a font that will support this. By default Arial doesn't have anti-aliasing in smaller sizes. This encourages a different font to be used.

Similarly, if one would like to apply a custom font to maptext, refer to THIS POST.

Everything you've said I've done. However, the fact that you said not all fonts support anti-aliasing helps out. I'll have a look around and see if anything comes to me.