Animated text is still jaggy with Powerpoint 2003 viewer

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Guest

The old bugbear of animated text being jaggy seems to be fixed in Powerpoint
2003 with all the updates applied. BUT it's still there when you view your
presentation using pptview.exe. So animated text still isn't any use unless
you're playing your presentation with Powerpoint itself.

Anyone know when this might be fixed in the viewer? It's been around for
long enough...

Mike
 
I feel that "jagged" text (the inabiliity to anti-aliase text) in PPT is the
weak link of the entire program. But if the text looks okay in the full
application, it may or may not look jagged using the Viewer depending on the
computer being used. The Viewer cannot take advantage of (video/graphics
card) hardware acceleration, so depending on the computer the text may or
may not render suitably... Try running the presentation with the viewer on
some other computers, you should not that some run the animations better
than others and some will display the animated text better than others.
Defininition: Anti-alias
The problem: When you look closely, diagonal lines in text look blocky, with
"staircase" edges.

The solution: (Other than using a video system that doesn't use square
pixels or create all text in PhotoShop) For an application to blur the
colors along the stair-steps a little, to soften the jagged edges. This is
what anti-aliasing does.


--
Best Regards,
Troy Chollar
TLC Creative Services, Inc.
troy at tlc creative dot com
www dot tlccreative dot com
==================================
A Microsoft PowerPoint MVP
==================================
 
Initially I'm running the viewer on the same PC as I'm running PowerPoint
itself. It only happens with animated text, take away the animations and the
text displays nice & smoothly with the viewer.

Oddly, Microsoft acknowledges that the problem exists with text in a graph
(http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;891826) but not with
text in general.

Basically it renders custom animations useless if you're going to distribute
your presentation.

If you google "powerpoint jaggy text animation" (without the quotes) you get
a lot of relevant hits, though none appear to differentiate between the
viewer and PowerPoint itself. As I sit here the combination of
PowerPoint2003 and all the latest Office 2003 updates (which I installed this
afternoon in vain attempt at solving the problem) works fine, but the viewer
doesn't. I'd rather it were the other way around!

Mike
 
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