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Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io

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Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#111

Post by kccqzy »

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…

Top-to-bottom writing is not just prevalent in Japanese but also in Chinese too. Pick up any professionally published book in Taiwan and chances are it's written top-to-bottom.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#112

Post by einpoklum »

This is a nice intuitive introduction for the naive. Of course - there is more. @euske explains some extra trouble for CJK. There is also the hell of _direction_ - RTL vs LTR text on the same line. There is a complex bidirectional algorithm that's part of the Unicode standard [1], and it involves breaks up text into runs of RTL and LTR text - but it's not at all trivial, since many characters are actually neutral, like punctuation marks.

What's more, Unicode has a lot of control characters, that don't get rendered into glyphs but affect text rendering. These can be pretty tame, like space and non-breaking space - but some are rather nastly, like pushing and popping a stack of RTL-vs-LTR state (yes, it nests).

[1] : http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#113

Post by toast0 »

dahart wrote: post #73

I realize it’s probably too late, but as a graphics person, every time I read about text antialiasing, I wish we could rewind and fix the terminology of “Subpixel antialiasing” and “Greyscale antialiasing”. It seems problematic that greyscale antialiasing involves subpixel sampling and color channels. I’d suggest “LCD antialiasing” to replace “subpixel antialiasing”. And regular antialiasing doesn’t really need a ter…

"LCD" antialiasing worked fine on trinitron CRTs which had a well defined RGB alignment. Calling it LCD alignment is more confusing.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#115

Post by sings »

floatboth wrote: post #91
sings wrote: post #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.

> forgetting Or rather deliberately not including to decrease download size. Though OpenType variable fonts are a thing now. e.g. Inter https://rsms.me/inter/ has a variable version

Maybe deliberate, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. This is an optimisation where the user actually sees the artefact/degradation. And that font would otherwise be used over the whole session.

Excluding bold copy on the page or using system fonts in the design seem like better alternatives for saving bandwidth. Or appropriate use of the font-display property. Otherwise I see this as choosing custom fonts and only half implementing them for a design.

And variable fonts still need two sets of outlines to interpolate between glyph weights, so they may not completely answer the problem.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#116

Post by earthboundkid »

gumby wrote: post #99
earthboundkid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese is one of the few languages with a worse writing system than English. Hats off to them for it. I do miss the pre-war spellings though, where they wrote things based on 10c pronunciation, eg AU is pronounced OH (like in French). Tibetan is also in pretty desperate need of spelling reform. I’d love to hear replies about other terrible writing systems.

In the scheme of writing systems it's hard for me to see why English is so bad. In general writing (like spoken grammar) is so heavily used that all the "rough corners" get sanded smooth pretty rapidly and continuously. For example, though the histogram of Kanji/Hanzi has a very steep drop-off, it's not that hard for people to recognize and keep track of, because characters that were hard to read at first tend to get…

English is pretty bad unless you are a total orthography history nerd.

For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method.

English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#117

Post by reaperducer »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21
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.

This for sure. I love my iMac 27” 5k simply because how text looks on it so much better than even a 28” 4K. 220 DPI is a magical number

Want a bit of pixel shock? Find someone with an original iPhone.

I fired mine up a few weeks ago and simply couldn't believe that we used to use screens that low resolution and blurry. My eyes have become spoiled.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#118

Post by reaperducer »

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

Ashton-Tate's Framework on a green Hercules was my daily driver for a very long time. Multi-tasking (sort of), windows, and the ability to cut-and-paste between applications in a text-only environment years before Microsoft Windows was usable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)

Picture: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/spotlight/Famework%201.0%20-%...

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#120

Post by zamadatix »

otterley wrote: post #100
zamadatix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half sure, 90% no.

There are over 2.5 billion active Android devices ( https://twitter.com/Android/status/1125822326183014401 ). There were over 700 million active iPhones in 2017, likely more today ( https://fortune.com/2017/03/06/apple-iphone-use-worldwide/ ). So conservatively there are over 3 billion smartphones. Microsoft claims there are over 1 billion Windows 10 installations ( https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsd…

> So conservatively there are over 3 billion smartphones.

> so that means that less than 2 billion Windows installations are in existence.

In what world is 3 billion out of 5 billion >= 90%? I repeat "Half sure, 90% no."

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