161–170 of 172 posts
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Have you tried `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO`? (also needs a reboot)
Yep, but some say it's gone from Catalina. I don't try betas. Can someone on 10.15 verify that this still works?
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)
I got some printed marketing material at a trade show last week. Screenshot of grey sub-pixel text, enlarged and printed in CMYK onto flyers. Obviously blurry and color-fringed; hard to believe anyone approved that artwork or finished product.
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…
Isn't the that point of UNIcode?
To unify all text into a single character set so that can exist side-by-side without messing with code pages?
Isn't this just code pages all over again?
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…
> but more formally it should be marked with different lang attributes (in case of HTML). Isn't the that point of UNIcode? To unify all text into a single character set so that can exist side-by-side without messing with code pages? Isn't this just code pages all over again?
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…
If I were to write it, I would write "tv" first. And draw an extended variant of "I" to cover "tv"
In text rendering, this translates to a custom ligature for an unexpected combo. I am not sure how feasible it is to add ligatures for every such combos
In real life, as long as the reader "gets" it, they would assume that it is the right way to write it :)
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.
You may need to be able to read some scripts, but learning scripts is much easier than learning languages. Most text rendering experts I know seem to be bilingual or monolingual, but understand the mechanics of a lot more scripts (and can read a couple). Many of them are people who taught themselves about other scripts as they went along.
It's quite easy to talk about text from other scripts in a more clinical way without actually being able to read the script: I've often had text rendering discussions about the Perso-Arabic or Devanagari scripts with folks who can't 100% read the script, but know the mechanics of the script: you can totally describe things in terms of general categories like consonants and vowels (in both scripts they behave differently, an equivalent in the Latin script would be talking about letters and accent marks).
I once wrote https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/15/breaking-our-l... which goes through the various ways scripts deviate from Latin that most programmers should know. There's a lot that isn't listed there (which only folks working specifically on text would need to care about), but it's not hard to acquire that background to a level well enough to be effective.
As demonstrated in that post you can also "collapse" a lot of scripts together into one set of scripts with similar behavior. A lot of the weirdness in text shaping, for example, is covered by the Perso-Arabic script and any one Indic script. I like to say that there's a reason so many people involved in text shaping are Persians.
Personally, while this stuff isn't my dayjob, I can read around ten scripts to varying degrees of success but I know like ... a couple words from each language whose script I can read. It's not hard to learn to read a script, and as I mentioned you don't even need to be able to read them: If we're counting understanding the mechanics of scripts, my 10 balloons to a number I can't even count, because I can for example now include most Indic scripts. I've had productive conversations in Unicode spaces about e.g the Punjabi script without being able to properly read it.
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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.
If people who speak Chinese want to use pinyin, more power to them. But English speakers need to stop just copying other people's romanizations even when the romanizations do not connect to our spelling system at all.
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> English has the really good feature that there is a phonic correspondence between spelling and pronunciation It's absolutely not the case and it's actually one of the most mocked feature of English on the internet. The pronunciation of the name of “Sean Bean” is a good example. As a non native speaker, I have had a lot of pain learning the pronunciation of words I've only seen written. In American English, you have…
> And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects. But you can try . And it will kinda work. If you pronounce "Sean Bean" as "seen bean" (most likely), "shawn bawn", or "say-an bay-an" (that's gonna require some thought for a native ...) people will scrunch their brow, think a bit, maybe chuckle, and have an idea who you are talking about--especially if they've been around you for a couple da…
I don't want to defend kanji/hanzi as a writing system. It's also in debt to history in a crazy way. But as a non-native reader of Japanese, you can often figure out the pronunciation and meaning of unfamiliar characters based on how they look. A large majority, maybe 90%, of characters have a meaning-part and sound-part, and once you know the common roots, you can get pretty far by just looking at things. You can also move to Korean and Cantonese pretty easily because those preserved the pronunciations of old Chinese pretty well. Ironically, Mandarin did a pretty bad job of preserving old Chinese, so it's harder to match up.
E.g. 楽 (music) is old Chinese nguk, Japanese gaku, Cantonese ngok, Korean ak, and Mandarin yue(??).
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> And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects. But you can try . And it will kinda work. If you pronounce "Sean Bean" as "seen bean" (most likely), "shawn bawn", or "say-an bay-an" (that's gonna require some thought for a native ...) people will scrunch their brow, think a bit, maybe chuckle, and have an idea who you are talking about--especially if they've been around you for a couple da…
> English is remarkably error tolerant I don't know what's your primary language, but as a French person I can tell you that no, English isn't that error tolerant and people don't understand what you mean if your pronunciation isn't good enough. I still have traumatic flashback of my younger self desperately trying to buy water (pronouncing “wa” as in waffles and “ter” as in territory ) in Canada when I was 15 (and r…