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

Modern Text Rendering with Linux

mrandri19.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 20 posts

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#11

Post by criddell »

raphlinus wrote: post #9
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that very high dpi screens are so popular and inexpensive, is subpixel rendering worth doing anymore?

It's important to make the distinction between subpixel positioning and subpixel (RGB) rendering. I'd personally say yes to the former, even at high dpi, and no to the latter if you're on a mobile device. The kerning errors you get from quantizing the position of glyphs to integer pixels are, to my eyes, a noticeable degradation of quality.

Do you know if the layout engines for laser printers do subpixel stuff?

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#12

Post by microcolonel »

Jasper_ wrote: post #3

This is missing a text layout engine: separating a string of texts into multiple blocks with word wrap. This is handled in GTK+ through Pango and in Qt with an internal algorithm. I don't believe FreeBiDi/ICU is used in either.

HarfBuzz for shaping, too.

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#13

Post by microcolonel »

criddell wrote: post #11
raphlinus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to make the distinction between subpixel positioning and subpixel (RGB) rendering. I'd personally say yes to the former, even at high dpi, and no to the latter if you're on a mobile device. The kerning errors you get from quantizing the position of glyphs to integer pixels are, to my eyes, a noticeable degradation of quality.

Do you know if the layout engines for laser printers do subpixel stuff?

Most laser printers tend to use PostScript (a Turing complete language), which does not know about displays hardly at all. It does arbitrary positioning.

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#14

Post by microcolonel »

Matthias247 wrote: post #10
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that very high dpi screens are so popular and inexpensive, is subpixel rendering worth doing anymore?

I don’t know the details, but on my 4K screen different applications font rendering looks very has a very noticeable difference in quality. Eg IntelliJ looks great, and afaik uses some form of subpixel Rendering. Where’s VS Code looks kind of crappy since the update to macOS Mojave, which as far as I understood changed font rendering

Yeah, at distances people actually view displays at, there is still a benefit to subpixel rendering and some amount of hinting, even on "retina" displays.

Far as I'm concerned, high res displays help hinting do less damage, but they don't render it obsolete.

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#16

Post by [deleted] »

microcolonel wrote: post #14
Matthias247 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know the details, but on my 4K screen different applications font rendering looks very has a very noticeable difference in quality. Eg IntelliJ looks great, and afaik uses some form of subpixel Rendering. Where’s VS Code looks kind of crappy since the update to macOS Mojave, which as far as I understood changed font rendering

Yeah, at distances people actually view displays at, there is still a benefit to subpixel rendering and some amount of hinting, even on "retina" displays. Far as I'm concerned, high res displays help hinting do less damage, but they don't render it obsolete.

[deleted]

Re: Modern Text Rendering with Linux

#19

Post by criddell »

microcolonel wrote: post #13
criddell wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if the layout engines for laser printers do subpixel stuff?

Most laser printers tend to use PostScript (a Turing complete language), which does not know about displays hardly at all. It does arbitrary positioning.

> It does arbitrary positioning.

So are you saying that whether or not subpixel effects are accounted for is implementation dependent?

Post reply on HN