Posted on Wednesday 24 May 2006
When you place a line in between pixels in medium quality mode, the line smudges and its thickness looks like it is 1 pixel larger than it is supposed to be, which makes it hard to use this mode for practical purposes. It’s too bad too, because the quality is a lot better than low quality, yet it’s quite a bit faster than high quality mode. It turns out the pixel hinting for lines solves this issue.
If you draw your lines through actionscript, you can set the fourth parameter to true. If working through the IDE, you can click the ’stroke hinting’ checkbox. This will solve the medium quality smudging issue. All the other line options, like capping and joint style are also available through MovieClip.lineStyle which gained 5 (!) new optional parameters while you busy looking at the filter and BitmapData documentation. Just one of those tiny little things that make Flash 8 so much more fun to work with.
