21–30 of 172 posts
High-DPI (namely 200+ DPI, aka Retina) text rendering on desktop computers is one of the more impactful hardware developments for programmers in a while. When you're looking at text all day every day, having every single glyph take a massive step up in fidelity (4x the pixel budget!) is not to be sneezed at.
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
> 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.
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://…
The text I see looks fine, although the font is different.
If Microsoft adopted the Mac font rendering aesthetic and fixed their CFF rasterizer, we wouldn't need to worry about TrueType hinting anymore. But now, since your PDFs and Web fonts get viewed on Windows, you need to use TrueType outlines with Windows-friendly hinting even if you aren't using Windows yourself.
- time
- indoor positioning
High-DPI (namely 200+ DPI, aka Retina) text rendering on desktop computers is one of the more impactful hardware developments for programmers in a while. When you're looking at text all day every day, having every single glyph take a massive step up in fidelity (4x the pixel budget!) is not to be sneezed at.
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.