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The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

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Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#51

Post by captainmuon »

Oh no, why would they do this? You could already achieve something similar (and superior IMO) with the old FreeType by enabling "loose hinting" (ignoring hinting in x-direction) and using RGBA subpixel hinting. Ignoring horizontal hinting only really works when you have subpixel hinting, because of the ~tripled horizontal resolution.

I don't understand why anybody (MS, the FreeType devs, ...) would choose DirectWrite style rendering. It just looks blurry to me. Even on a hidpi display, where it shouldn't make a difference, it looks wierd compared to GDI rendering. One major reason I don't like Edge, and also find Metro and XAML apps somehow yucky (just a gut reaction, I'm not judging them technically).

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#52

Post by edwintorok »

thristian wrote: post #7

Man, all these years I assumed FreeType's "slight" hinting setting was secretly the 'ignore horizontal hinting' option.

Yes, IIUC https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener... the difference is what provides the vertical hinting:

FreeType FreeType 2.6.2+ hint=slight: use native "vertical-grid-only-snapping" for OpenType/CFF, fallback to autohinter "vertical-grid-only"

FreeType 2.7.0 v40 default: support TrueType too for native "vertical-grid-only-snapping", and enable this by default (regardless if hint is set to slight or not?)

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#53

Post by ComodoHacker »

stupidcar wrote: post #50
mrob wrote: post #3

"Switching to the new mode might take some getting used to though, so if you think your fonts are suddenly fat, fuzzy or weird, give your brain some time to adjust." This is true, and IMO it's the reason font rendering is much less important than people think. When I got a new pair of glasses I disabled font anti-aliasing to make the edges as sharp as possible. I did this so I could more quickly learn to focus my eye…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Kurt Cobain.

Wasn't that Henry Ford?

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#54

Post by lmm »

strcat wrote: post #41
Esau wrote: post #23

FreeType is not "Linux" software but "UNIX" software. I don't understand why this keeps happening.

It runs on Windows and other non-unix-like operating systems too.

It does? I remember when I was using SUA I had to build without FreeType (its build process seemed to rely heavily on building programs and then running them to produce things to build, in some way that didn't work).

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#55

Post by Freak_NL »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
krig wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the main reason for algorithmic fonts is so that non-latin characters scale up nicely. Storing chinese characters at a high bitmap resolution gets expensive fast, and you'd need several bitmaps for each character to keep them legible at smaller sizes.

Trying to have chinese characters legible at "smaller sizes" is a hopeless cause; they contain much more information than letters do and they consequently need more space. Check out the rendering of the very common character 疆, which HN would like to slot in at basically the same size as the rest of the text. As it shows on my computer, it's legible -- but not correct. (Most egregiously, the horizontal stroke at the…

Interesting. I do get the bottom stroke of 土 with the Freetype version shipped with Ubunutu 16.04. Most of both 田 is a blur though.

Testing this reminded me that I always read HN two zoom-levels higher than the smallish default.

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #53
stupidcar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Kurt Cobain.

Wasn't that Henry Ford?

It was probably Michael Scott.

( https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/some-things-are... )

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#57

Post by augustk »

mschuster91 wrote: post #9

Finally. To be honest I switched back to using Windows on my private machine because font rendering on Linux (using Chromium and Firefox) was more like a lottery than something readable without enough alcohol. A pity it will take some time to ship to Debian Testing, I'd love to try it without having to recompile the whole system.

What Linux distribution did you use? In my experience the font rendering in the common distributions, like Ubuntu, is rather good these days. Personally I use Debian stable with a simple window manager (Blackbox) and no X display manager. In this case I need to set a few variables in ~/.Xresources to get good results:

    Xft.antialias: true
    Xft.autohint: false
    Xft.dpi: 100
    Xft.hinting: true
    Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
    Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
    Xft.rgba: rgb

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#58

Post by amelius »

Can somebody explain this to me? In low resolutions, you can easily, with current memory sizes and bandwidths, store all the fonts in pixel format (compressed of course). At high resolutions, you don't need any hinting, so you can just render the font as svg paths for example.

So why do we still need an interpreter?

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#59

Post by gjm11 »

wbl wrote: post #36
cmrx64 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a typo of metafont, or is there another system called metaphont? I did a few web searches and didn't come up with anything.

Is a typo. no idea what my head was doing.

> no idea what my head was doing

Confusing METAFONT with metaphors, presumably.

Re: The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0

#60

Post by ghusbands »

Quppa wrote: post #32

Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet. † https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further-ev...

I believe part of the reason is that it was never fully compatible with screen rotation, often still assuming RGB order from text-left to text-right. Another part would be that the world is moving towards much higher resolution displays, where the effect of subpixel rendering is negligible.
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