How to get text in a CATextLayer to be clear

Question

I've made a CALayer with an added CATextLayer and the text comes out blurry. In the docs, they talk about "sub-pixel antialiasing", but that doesn't mean much to me. Anyone have a code snippet that makes a CATextLayer with a bit of text that is clear?

Here's the text from Apple's documentation:

Note: CATextLayer disables sub-pixel antialiasing when rendering text. Text can only be drawn using sub-pixel antialiasing when it is composited into an existing opaque background at the same time that it's rasterized. There is no way to draw subpixel-antialiased text by itself, whether into an image or a layer, separately in advance of having the background pixels to weave the text pixels into. Setting the opacity property of the layer to YES does not change the rendering mode.

The second sentence implies that one can get good looking text if one composites it into an existing opaque background at the same time that it's rasterized. That's great, but how do I composite it and how do you give it an opaque background and how do you rasterize it?

The code they use in their example of a Kiosk Menu is as such: (It's OS X, not iOS, but I assume it works!)

NSInteger i;
for (i=0;i<[names count];i++) {
    CATextLayer *menuItemLayer=[CATextLayer layer];
    menuItemLayer.string=[self.names objectAtIndex:i];
    menuItemLayer.font=@"Lucida-Grande";
    menuItemLayer.fontSize=fontSize;
    menuItemLayer.foregroundColor=whiteColor;
    [menuItemLayer addConstraint:[CAConstraint
         constraintWithAttribute:kCAConstraintMaxY
                      relativeTo:@"superlayer"
                       attribute:kCAConstraintMaxY
                          offset:-(i*height+spacing+initialOffset)]];
    [menuItemLayer addConstraint:[CAConstraint
         constraintWithAttribute:kCAConstraintMidX
                      relativeTo:@"superlayer"
                       attribute:kCAConstraintMidX]];
    [self.menuLayer addSublayer:menuItemLayer];
} // end of for loop 

Thanks!

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EDIT: Adding the code that I actually used that resulted in blurry text. It's from a related question I posted about adding a UILabel rather than a CATextLayer but getting a black box instead. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3818676/adding-a-uilabels-layer-to-a-calayer-and-it-just-shows-black-box

CATextLayer* upperOperator = [[CATextLayer alloc] init];
CGColorSpaceRef space = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB();
CGFloat components1[4] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0};
CGColorRef almostWhite = CGColorCreate(space,components1);
CGFloat components2[4] = {0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0};
CGColorRef almostBlack = CGColorCreate(space,components2);
CGColorSpaceRelease(space);
upperOperator.string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"13"];
upperOperator.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, 100, 50);
upperOperator.foregroundColor = almostBlack;
upperOperator.backgroundColor = almostWhite;
upperOperator.position = CGPointMake(50.0, 25.0);
upperOperator.font = @"Helvetica-Bold";
upperOperator.fontSize = 48.0f;
upperOperator.borderColor = [UIColor redColor].CGColor;
upperOperator.borderWidth = 1;
upperOperator.alignmentMode = kCAAlignmentCenter;
[card addSublayer:upperOperator];
[upperOperator release];
CGColorRelease(almostWhite);
CGColorRelease(almostBlack);

---

EDIT 2: See my answer below for how this got solved. sbg.

Answer 1

Hey Steve,

First off I wanted to point out that you've tagged your question with iOS, but constraint managers are only available on OSX, so I'm not sure how you're getting this to work unless you've been able to link against it in the simulator somehow. On the device, this functionality is not available.

Next, I'll just point out that I create CATextLayers often and never have the blurring problem you're referring to so I know it can be done. In a nutshell this blurring occurs because you are not positioning your layer on the whole pixel. Remember that when you set the position of a layer, you use a float values for the x and y. If those values have numbers after the decimal, the layer will not be positioned on the whole pixel and will therefore give this blurring effect--the degree of which depending upon the actual values. To test this, just create a CATextLayer and explicitly add it to the layer tree ensuring that your position parameter is on a whole pixel. For example:

CATextLayer textLayer = [CATextLayer layer];
[textLayer setBounds:CGRectMake(0.0f, 0.0f, 200.0f, 30.0f)];
[textLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(200.0f, 100.0f)];
[textLayer setString:@"Hello World!"];

[[self menuLayer] addSublayer:textLayer];

If you're text is still blurry, then there is something else wrong. Blurred text on your text layer is an artifact of incorrectly written code and not an intended capability of the layer. When adding your layers to a parent layer, you can just coerce the x and y values to the nearest whole pixel and it should solve your blurring problem.

Best regards.

Answer 2

A while ago I learned that when you have custom drawing code, you have to check for the retina display and scale your graphics accordingly. UIKit takes care of most of this, including font scaling.

Not so with CATextLayer.

My blurriness came from having a .zPosition that was not zero, that is, I had a transform applied to my parent layer. By setting this to zero, the blurriness went away, and was replaced by serious pixelation.

After searching high and low, I found that you can set .contentsScale for a CATextLayer and you can set it to [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale] to match the screen resolution. (I assume this works for non-retina, but I haven't checked - too tired)

After including this for my CATextLayer the text became crisp. Note - it's not necessary for the parent layer.

And the blurriness? It comes back when you're rotating in 3D, but you don't notice it because the text starts out clear and while it's in motion, you can't tell.

Problem solved!