71–80 of 86 posts
KUDOS to all contributors, especially for the last few release of FreeType which really rocked!
"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…
I'm not saying bitmap fonts don't have their place, but that place is typically old computers or small embedded devices where the complexity of rendering vector fonts is an actual unnecessary performance bottleneck. Vector fonts are easy to use and quick to render, they produce crisp glyphs at virtually (Besides extremely low) resolution and pixel density.
I have a 14" 1080p laptop and so I'm not constantly squinting I use 125% windows scaling and usually about 125% scaling in Google Chrome, although it varies from website to website. With vector fonts this just works, using bitmap fonts would be a lot of ~~software~~ complexity for very little value.
What? As someone who hates Windows' Font rendering, why would you want this? The OS X font rendering is awesome, on Linux, Infinality can be tweaked to look even better, but windows? It's hideous, inconsistent and terrible to change...
No. No stop. I install MacType, which hacks windows's font rendering and replaces it with freetype, SPECIFICALLY so I can /avoid/ cleartype's ugly rendering on windows. I don't want it to invade my linux/mac as well!
It's not a mandatory feature. It provides options that it didn't have before without having lost anything.
"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…
This. A thousand times this.
The sad fact is embedded hand-written quality pixel grid is in old MS core fonts and basically nowhere else to find.
"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…
Font hinting and anti-aliasing is only useful because people have giant ~70-100 dpi screens which look awful without it. On mobile where you have 300-400 DPI it's no issue. Even with 4k desktop monitors with ~200 DPI it seems much less necessary.
"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…
Maybe so, but there's still a need for fonts that are legible before you're used to them, for things like traffic signs.
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...
Edge actually has ClearType on by default in the upcoming update though.
"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…
