I am trying to look for a bug report before I post one, about the system tray icon for temperature appearing nearly unreadable when using the Zune windows xp theme, regardless of the colors chosen. I suspect it may be because of an attempt to use a 3D etching effect for the letters, but I am not sure.
BUT, when I enter the following search criteria:
icons system tray
It tells me that the words are far too common to use in a search. That’s a tad over-restrictive IMHO, and will only lead to far more more posts than needed (assuming people are trying to be good forum citizens and search first :icon_smile: )
If each word is tested individually for commonality it excludes things that are far less common than any of them individually. e.g., icons, system, and tray, may all be too common, but when the requirement is that they are all together then they should not be.
I suspect what’s happening is related to the font smoothing subsystem within windows. I’m on XP Pro SP3. BY THE WAY, this did not happen under my prior installation (which was XP Pro SP2). Crashed HD, so I reinstalled----perhaps there’s a differing thing going on.
Looks like something in the pre-press industry called “font hinting”, which is the technique where fonts given a limited number of pixels to draw with are given “hints” about how to draw for clarity. For example, prior to hinting algorithms the lower case “e”'s were ROUTINELY filled in on small fonts. Perhaps you remember those ugly days…
To Summarize, I just dunno. Here’s two of mine (orig and 16x) followed by two of someone else in that thread who had no display issues (orig and 16x). Grrrrr… If you like, feel free to move this message to that thread.
I’ll help you fault-isolate this if you like. I’m a long time software engineer specializing in UI/Graphics, but in the Java world, so beats me if I can help.
tgm1024, I do agree that the temperature icon looks off on your computer. All of the other icons looks funny as well, so I’m not so sure this issue is only affecting the Weather Watcher temperature icon. Perhaps EdP’s suggestion above will help.
Well I’ve long since tried changing those parameters.
Font smoothing (either type: standard, or clear type) does nothing to the icon. But I prefer the smoothing to be off for the desktop fonts: It’s never clear which font will do well with the various smoothing algorithms.
Resolution is set to 1280x800 (native res of the laptop) at 32 bit color depth.
Hmmm…I wonder. Where exactly is the size of the tray icons managed. If they are set by the zune theme to be, say, 17x17 then a pretty awful scaling will be employed.
Here’s two of mine (orig and 16x) followed by two of someone else in that thread who had no display issues (orig and 16x). Grrrrr… If you like, feel free to move this message to that thread.