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Text Rendering Hates You

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Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#121

Post by Const-me »

z3t4 wrote: post #24
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://…

With high density monitors on the rise we should get rid of LCD (RGB rainbows) anti alias as its really just a hack.

New high-end PCs indeed use high DPI displays, but color LCD monitors are now used in cars, dishwashers and microwaves. These are not high-DPI, and they often lack CPU and GPU power to handle high DPI.

Here's a library I've made for an embedded Linux device: https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg At 5" 800x480, subpixel AA improved text a lot.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#122

Post by joe_the_user »

The other comments about the details rendering are great and an example of how much depth of knowledge you can find on HN (and all this is now well beyond my experience).

What I'd be curious about here, though, is what this says about large scale software engineering. Text rendering has to be one of the most common activities within a large number of computer program sorts and I know pieces of the text rendering process are common examples in texts on object oriented programming, indeed the different of rendering processes seem to suggest objects and interface readily. Yet the standard pipleline the author describes seems leakier than anything I saw twenty years when I dealt with such issues - nothing is solved on the software engineering side, the mess just grows.

Obviously, this is a product of adding new languages and new display models to the text rendering process, as well as standardizing the process so it accommodated different font approaches and etc.

But object orientation as well as related models promised, some time in the past, something akin to "encapsulate the process and adding complexity will be easier". Object oriented programming has lost almost all luster but what alternatives? Could the pipeline be less leaky in functional programming or something similar or something different.

It just makes me curious.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#123

Post by Izkata »

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…

Any time this general topic comes up, I like to drop the Chaos Poem as an example, for anyone who hasn't yet encountered it: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#124

Post by labster »

iamvik wrote: post #86
echelon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

geminated not germinated haha it's not a seed :p

Now you’re just arguing seminantics.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#125

Post by oofabz »

cosmotic wrote: post #105
lostgame wrote: post #102

I miss non-AA’d text. Like PalmOS or Windows 95. Gotta love the sharpness of it somehow.

I agree; I disable antialiasing to the best degree that I can when I code. This is not possible on Retina displays on MacOS though because they render at a higher resolution then down-sample. I was pretty disappointed the original article didn't talk much about hinting. Even old operating systems did a great job at type hinting to align glyphs to pixels (even when antialiasing is on). "Modern" operating systems (espe…

I like sharp, pixely text too but I don't like the color fringing you get on LCDs when you disable subpixel antialiasing. I wish I could get a display without this consistent chromatic abberation. One way to accomplish this would be to alternate subpixel layout from one pixel to the next. For example:

RGBBGR

BGRRGB

Then the errors in color would cancel out, much like in serpentine dithering. You could do the same with a Pentile pixel layout like this:

RGGR

BWWB

BWWB

RGGR

Either way, instead of seeing color fringing, I imagine it would give a grainy appearance similar to what dithering looks like.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#126

Post by bsder »

earthboundkid wrote: post #116
gumby wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is objecting to the .01%--I find it hard to take seriously.

English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. It's not always one-to-one, and it's sometimes really weird, but it's generally there.

So, if someone sees Xi Jinping in writing, the utterance out of their mouth will be close enough for me to know what they are talking about.

However, even when someone completely botches the spelling of a word, there is almost always enough logic behind the error for the person looking at it figure out the actual word meant. That's a really nice feature in a language. (For example--I have seen phlegm or subtle spelled in all manner of ways, but I generally could tell what was meant.).

By contrast, lots of the articles talking about Chinese highlight all the really common words that native speakers can't even cough up the kanji for because there is so little phonic correspondence.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#127

Post by fourthark »

dahart wrote: post #82
Diggsey wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Subpixel" makes more sense than "LCD": the technique applies to any screen with illumination units smaller than a pixel (eg. LED screens) so "subpixel" makes perfect sense.

Yes, it makes sense. My beef is not that subpixel doesn’t make sense, it’s that the term is overloaded. Standard antialiasing also involves subpixels and the term makes perfect sense there too. From my perspective, “subpixel” fails to differentiate. Now, using “Greyscale” to mean color, just not LCD color, that one doesn’t make as much sense to me. Some articles call it “whole pixel anatialiasing” or “traditional ant…

How does standard antialiasing involve subpixels - are you talking about retina or something?

It applies alpha to pixels of whatever size right? What's the sub- part?

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#128

Post by gumby »

kccqzy wrote: post #111
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.

And Mongolian, Korean, Uyghur...

If you add support for archaic systems you have to handle vertical bottom to top and boustrophedon too.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#129

Post by gumby »

earthboundkid wrote: post #116
gumby wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pinyin is requested by the Chinese government. They used to use Wade-Giles but changed iirc in the 70s and requested that others do so too.

It can’t really be called part of English in any meaningful way anyway.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#130

Post by yardshop »

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

I have happy memories of getting a monochrome bitmapped graphics driver working with Turbo Pascal and generating Clifford Pickover's million-point structures on my old amber monitor.
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