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Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io

11–20 of 172 posts

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#11
post #9

It seems that the term "subpixel" is overloaded. In one meaning the term refers to the RGB parts. In another meaning the result looks different when the text is shifted by less than a pixel, even on a monochrome screen.

Yep, this one confused me too. But this article appears to use the term consistently for the first meaning.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#15
post #6

One man's antialiasing is another mans blur. I, for one, prefer crisp bitmap fonts.

I prefer rendering with strict grid-fitting, with crisp stems but antialiased arcs. Unfortunately, in current Linux, it does not work even with full hinting enabled by standard fontconfig settings, one have to set magic variable FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35 .

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#16
post #3
post #2

Another pain point on text AA: Many renderers mix up colorspaces on antialiasing. For example freetype assumes a linear colorspace when calculating the antialiased bitmap but AFAIK both GTK and QT apply it directly on sRGB without any adjusting. The result is apparently thickened fonts when displayed black on white and thinned fonts when displayed white on black. Edit: Some background can be read on [0]. [0] https://…

I believe it's somewhat unavoidable as the fonts may also have co-evolved to work with renderers that work that way

Yes - fonts looked too thin and rather ugly when the color space "bug" was fixed in early Qt 5 (on Linux / more precisely, with FreeType glyph rendering) versions. The fix was reverted to fix the look of text.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#17
post #12

>3.2 Style Can Change Mid-Ligature >Here's what they look like in Chrome and Safari: Running 76.0.3809.132 here on Mac OS and it looks very different from the picture. Bug partially fixed? https://i.imgur.com/CcjATLO.png

It probably depends on the OS. I assume screenshots in the article are on Linux. On Windows it looks different still: https://i.imgur.com/ri2yUrR.png

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#18
post #12

>3.2 Style Can Change Mid-Ligature >Here's what they look like in Chrome and Safari: Running 76.0.3809.132 here on Mac OS and it looks very different from the picture. Bug partially fixed? https://i.imgur.com/CcjATLO.png

It probably depends on the OS. I assume screenshots in the article are on Linux. On Windows it looks different still: https://i.imgur.com/ri2yUrR.png

The article has Safari and Edge screenshots through, so I would assume Windows was used

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#19
> Synthetic bold: paint every glyph multiple times with a slight offset in your text-direction.

Designers forgetting to include a bold version of their web fonts is one of my biggest bug bears. It always stands out, especially on Safari on iOS as you zoom in and out.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#20
post #4

Fun fact about subpixel antialiasing: at some point, Firefox was printing the subpixels when printing PDFs displayed with PDF.js. That looked awful. I'm actually not sure whether that was fixed, as I haven't printed in years (also, I have disabled subpixel AA for a while because of my dual monitor not in the same direction setup)

Probably because pdf.js is implemented using so it's basically like printing screenshots of the PDF
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