July 26, 2009 in Blog, Graphics & Design by Raiyan

Stroke hinting

Anyone who have tried making rectangles with rounded corner must have noticed how odd those corners look as they tend to get pixelated and stick out from the body of the rectangle. See the image bellow if you still don’t get what I mean. Notice how odd those pixalted corners look. The same thing can happen with a curved line as well.

This is due to the anti-aliasing performed on the curved lines by flash. This looks worst when the rounded part is small. The problem is still present when the curved part is large, but it becomes less noticeable. Anti-aliasing is generally a very helpful feature. This case is one of the rare exceptions when anti-aliasing is better not performed.

To let flash know that you don’t want anti-aliasing to be performed on your curved lines, you have to enable stroke hinting. When stroke hinting is used, flash colors the whole pixels only during rendering. Skips the fractional pixels. Thus anti-aliasing is avoided. See result after enabling stroke-hinting in the image bellow.