61–70 of 86 posts
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?
"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…
Yes the most legible font is the one you're used to, but do we want to condition the next generation into thinking low dpi bitmapped fonts are the best? The thing is, we need to set the software defaults to be most pleasing to a population who has never had any prior experience. And IMHO, the print industry has figured that out centuries ago.
If it means the software for displaying them can be simpler, maybe yes? Personally I think the X fixed fonts (with a slashed zero) are pretty good... I can read text in that font all day in a terminal and not get tired.
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?
You'd still need the interpreter to generate the pixel format versions wouldn't you?
For example, they could write their own renderer, then manually adjust inflection points etc. at different point sizes.
Or, they could just render at a large resolution, scale down to smaller resolution, and adjust any imperfections how they like.
In the announcement, they explicitly state that the performance changes will make Arial and other very common fonts render less well. Is this a sound decision, in an age where these fonts are still very widely explicitly used?
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?
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…
So something like this is needed in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:
rgb
true
hintfull
true
lcddefault
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?
If you use a particular version of each letter at each size, you start to accumulate positioning error as you go along a line (or end up with odd gaps if you try to avoid it). Nowadays, we tend to aim for precise reproduction of the font's sizing, even where the size ends up not being a round number of pixels, for consistency. You'd then need at least 16 versions of each letter to approximately cover each subpixel po…
"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…
"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…
Trying to read ClearType for any length of time beyond casual glances actually makes me dizzy and my eyes start watering because of the lack of sharp edges to focus on. Non-subpixel-AA still looks slightly blurry, but I don't get the same "WTF is happening to my eyes" feeling. I prefer non-AA as well, and in the example screenshots posted in the other comment here, it's the font to the left, describing the current se…