How to disable text antialiasing

[Reinout Roels]

Hi!



I would like to turn off antialiasing for text. I know it makes it ugly but I have a very good reason: I'm working on a super low-res image where I can only use 8 colors. For this reason I want to disable all the grayscale and alpha pixels the anti-aliasing introduces.



In Gimp this is just a checkbox but I couldn't find an alternative in Pixelmator. This Gimp screenshot shows what I want to do:





Is there an easy way to do this in Pixelmator? Since a lot of people use Pixelmator for pixel art I'd assume Pixelmator would support this in one way or another.



Reinout

[stef]

I'd also like to turn this off for creating small icons that contain text.
Can anyone help?
Thanks

[st3f]

Hi stef.
As far as I am aware, it's not possible to render text without aliasing in Pixelmator. When I had to do one time, I chose a simulated pixel-based font and rendered it at exact point sizes so that the fake pixel-boundaries lined up with the real pixel boundaries. That way aliasing never occurred. If you'd rather do this with an existing font, you can remove the aliasing afterward.

Say you want a some text to render in black with aliased edges.
1. Set the text as you would like it.
2. Create a white layer underneath.
3. Merge the two layers.
4. Apply Threshold (Effect > Stylise > Threshold) and set the slider to where you want the cutoff point.

You now have the text as you want it. You just need to remove the white background. If you don't need to then stop here.

5. Invert the layer.
6. Apply Mask to Alpha (Effects > Other > Mask to Alpha).
7. Invert the layer again.

There may be other ways but this is the way my mind deals with it best. It's tempting to think that you could just convert the text to a bitmap and use the Threshold effect directly on this layer. Unfortunately that doesn't work as Threshold works on the intensity of the pixel and not its opacity.

Hope this helps. If you've any more questions, just come back and I'll see what I can do.

- Stef.