Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#51

Post by echelon »

euske wrote: post #43

A few minor things missing in OP (mostly CJK related) - Code point is sometimes not enough to determine the glyph. For example, U+5199 must look different in Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Typically this is handled by using different fonts, but more formally it should be marked with different lang attributes (in case of HTML). - Top-to-bottom writing mode is still pretty much in use in Japanese. HTML support is poo…

Elaboration for "ちょっ"

Japanese hiragana chi, small yo, and small tsu.

Hiragana is a syllabary (not alphabet!) comprised of 46 sounds. Small hiragana can be used to modify the sound of the leading character to expand the set of available phonemes. Here, "Chi (small)yo" becomes "cho".

Small tsu is special. It represents a doubled or germinated consonant.

For example ちょっと (chotto) sounds like chot-to. Example:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9Kk_RHn8Q

Japanese is a really fun language. If you've ever had an interest in learning it, I recommend it. Reading kanji is a joy in and of itself, because it has a pleasant inner logic that gets deeper the more you learn.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#52

Post by jjgod »

leni536 wrote: 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://…

Qt does do gamma correction when it comes to text rendering.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#53

Post by enriquto »

frou_dh wrote: post #7

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.

i tend to prefer low-resolution displays because the battery lasts much longer. Do not really see the point of tiny pixels

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#54

Post by jancsika »

glandium wrote: 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)

So your printer would literally leak information about your display?

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#55

Post by aidenn0 »

jacobush wrote: post #28
frou_dh wrote: post #7

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.

I miss my amber Hercules screen

My first screen was one as well. Insanely high horizontal resolution for the day too.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#56

Post by otterley »

thrower123 wrote: post #44
hsivonen wrote: post #26

If it weren't for Windows, we could move on from TrueType outlines (.ttf) to CFF outlines (.otf). .otf works nicely on non-Microsoft rasterizers. It was terrible on XP. Now on Windows 10 it’s less terrible, but .otf fonts on Windows 10 using DirectWrite look bolder and blurrier than using FreeType, Apple, or Adobe rasterizers. If Microsoft adopted the Mac font rendering aesthetic and fixed their CFF rasterizer, we wo…

Someday, 90% of people won't be running Windows... It's been said for decades now, but it might happen some day.

If we consider smartphone browsers, that time has already come to pass!

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#57

Post by ainar-g »

gravitas wrote: post #39

I find it... odd that an article on font rendering is using a 14px forced font size (default: 16px) making the article really hard to read on my 14" laptop screen from a foot away. Subpixel antialiasing on my LCD screen is just not my problem here, author. :)

I am a partially vision-impaired man, and I really can't stand the dark-grey on light-grey texts that a lot of modern web pages have. They are essentially unreadable to me. In order to comfortably read this article, I had to go to Firefox's Style Editor and make the text actually black.

And it is ironic that an article about text rendering uses such low-contrast and small-sized text.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#58

Post by frou_dh »

enriquto wrote: post #53
frou_dh wrote: post #7

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.

i tend to prefer low-resolution displays because the battery lasts much longer. Do not really see the point of tiny pixels

Point is that diminishing returns for great legibility kick in far north of ~100 DPI. Perhaps 330 or 440 is pointless at typical desktop viewing distances, but 220 certainly isn't.

I mean, just because ~100 looks okay isn't grounds to get stuck in a rut dictated by what was economical to mass produce in the year 2000s.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#59

Post by anderspitman »

frou_dh wrote: post #7

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.

Agree. I love my 4k monitor, and I think 8k will reach the point where I don't need any higher resolution.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#60

Post by raphlinus »

commandlinefan wrote: post #47

It seems like you’d need to read at least a few dozen languages fluently to be able to meaningfully reason about some of these issues. I can’t imagine what sort of educational background experts on rendering would have.

I'm not fluent in any language (except maybe English), but this was my job on Android for about five years, and I still have my hand in. I got very good at being able to spot various forms of incorrect rendering, and of course called in the experts when needed.

One of my favorite examples was Devanagari shaping. In the word ट्विटर (tvitar = Twitter), does the "i" matra shape before the "tv" it in the middle of it? In my sample, people accepted it either way (and you'll see both depending on font), but there are lots of examples where one is just wrong.

Post reply on HN