Crisp fgpanel graphics

[dhudach]

I am building a number of fgpanels for a cockpit implementation. I have been quite successful at rotating instruments 90 degrees for vertical panels, adding needles to some of the instruments that aren't implemented fully. I even created an analog clock with fully functioning hour, minute and second hands. So far so good. The workflow for instrument graphics is basically to create the instrument in Inkscape. Then save it as .png. Open the png file in GIMP and export as rgb. This all works great. However, in a lot of cases, the graphics, especially text aren't very crisp. I am focusing on text, trying to get it smooth and crisp. Are there some guidelines how to get the best text images in fgpanel. I've tried including the text in the clock svg. I've tried making the text a separate svg file and experimenting with various fonts, spacing, image sizes and doing the scaling in the fgpanel clock xml file. But when the image is positioned and displayed in the clock, the text doesn't look smooth, sometimes letters are gone or parts of the letters are missing. If I display a large text image at a large size, it looks ok. But when I start to scale it to the size I need for the panel, it loses clarity and crispness. I've tried antialiasing on and off, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Any suggesting are greatly appreciated! This is the clock (rotated 90 degrees for a vertical panel) with a separate Electric text image layer and you can see that it doesn't look crisp:



The clock numbers are part of the clock svg file, and they don't look too bad, but they could even use some improvement.

Thanks in advance.

[JJTECS]

fg relies on AC3D for modeling aircrafts and instruments. You could readily work from existing .ac files contained in each aircraft.

[dhudach]

It seems to me that fgpanel doesn't use AC3D files. When I try to use them, nothing happens - nothing is rendered. When I posed that very question in this forum a few weeks ago, I was told that fgpanel only uses the 3D instruments .... which are essentially rgb files which I am generating for my custom instruments. To me from a logical perspective, fgpanel shouldn't care if the rbg is created by me or if it exists within fg someplace - it seems to me that it simply reads, imports and renders the file. In other words, I don't think there is anything that does or even should prevent me from creating custom instruments. In fact, I used the original custom clock svg file for webpanel and it was fine. I recognize that there are differences between fgpanel and webpanel under the hood. But essentially I think once the mechanisms are understood, custom instruments and behavior should be well within the existing software.

But thanks for the advice.

[wkitty42]

3D or 2D?? i thought the fgpanel was only 2D...

[dhudach]

Exactly, from everything I have found out, fgpanel is 2D only. That was the point I was making - that the AC3D files will not work in fgpanel. This is based on what I have read and discussed and also what I have discovered from trying it.