Hey everyone. Some of you recently helped me on my quest to achieve TrueType/ClearType/super Wu type of edge softening/anti aliasing. TrueType is Apple and ClearType is Microsoft. I am happy to report that the results are very encouraging to say the least. I'm talking about applying this kind of anti aliasing to all foreground shapes, text and images in pictures and videos. The edging of this new process is based on what pictures or videos are under the edged foreground image when the background surrounding that foreground image is made transparent, even if the edged picture or video frame is itself moving.
The processing time it takes to apply this type of edging to videos is pretty slow but the quality of the results appears at this point to exceed my expectations. In addition to this, I'm also working on another new faster edging feature that will do semi-TrueType edging. All of these methods are designed to work only on raster scan foreground images on transparencies since any existing edge softening screws up the results. Thus, the de-edging tools I made remove existing anti aliasing so that it can be re-applied later after other work is done to improve the image and make it be truly and universally transparent. The program does all this graphically without relying on any existing standard algorithms using BGRABitmap fast pixel access. The reason that the former process is slow to process videos is due to the many passes that are made though each video frame and it would be impossible w/o BGRA. An interesting thing is that these methods can be applied to both solid color backgrounds and non-changing or changing muli-colored backgrounds.
Anyway, all this has been made possible by Lazarus and the Forum and I thank you very much. I am excited about this. I was unsure whether to post this note here or in the third party section. I hope that posting it here is okay. I had hoped that some of the folks who helped me here in the graphics section would see this note since they took so much effort, patience and time to help me. They sure know their stuff. Much work remains but the hard part is done.