The Year of Linux on Desktop.
Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
11–20 of 117 posts
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#12These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…
Apple also avoids the issue by always working with integer scale in software. For a fractional scale, it is downscaled by hardware. They also do not have exact percentage scale (for example: their 175% is actually 177.7778%, because it better allocates the pixels, i.e. use 8 pixel block on the display for each 9 pixels in framebuffer).
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#13These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…
> Apple avoids trouble and work by always using HiDPI displays. Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward.
You may personally find the output awkward, but typographers will disagree. They didn't always have high density displays. They did always have superior type rendering, with output more closely matching the underlying design. Hinting was used, but they didn't clobber the shapes to fit the pixel grid like Microsoft did.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#14Haiku OS in my opinion solves this better by basing everything on default font size (in pixels). Eg it defaults to 12px, I used 20px for a 3840x2160 monitor. Some GUI widgets scale based on this. All text (when using be_default_font) scale based on this. Spacing / layout depends on this. The key difference (compared to a global x1.5 scaling factor) is that developers of each app decide how to use this information, so different parts of the GUI are scaled disproportionatily. Sloppy apps ignore this, but the devs are quickly notified. So you end up with text larger but GUI widgets can grow dis-proportionatily, so you can fine tune what is 125%, 150%, etc. Eg. ScrollBar can be 125%, toolbar 150%, text 233%. Haiku has had this since the beginning (even BeOS in the 90’s had this). By 2024, almost all non compliant apps have been fixed and support this.
What Haiku needs is font setting per screen/resolution for multimonitor support. This way you can support mismatched monitors with different factors.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#15This is fantastic work - there's a huge difference here for my eyes at least.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward. Ironically for "always expose relevant options through system settings" Apple, you can still access font smoothing via command line, e.g. "defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3". You can use 0-3 where 0 disables it (default) and 3 uses "strong" hinting, with 1 and 2 in between.
Nit: the option does not hint, it emboldens text, as in, smears it a bit to make it appear thicker. And I think the default is actually 2?
Well whatever it does, I actually prefer it to hinting and always have. Whatever happens on linux makes the fonts look too thin for my personal taste.
Regardless, I hope everyone agrees that hi dpi + no hinting (or smearing) looks the best.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#17These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…
> Apple avoids trouble and work by always using HiDPI displays. Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward. You may personally find the output awkward, but typographers will disagree. They didn't always have high density displays. They did always have superior type rendering, with output more closely matching the underlying design. Hinting was used, but they did…
Both variants had their fans and anti-fans. Apple rendering was shape-preserving but blurry, Microsoft's shape-deforming but crisp.
I personally like the Apple rendering, but I realize that many people around me don't. In the end, it is subjective.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#18The new renderer definitely looks better, but the letters still have something fuzzy about them. They don't feel crisp. Is this due to the font or due to the rendering?
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#19These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…
> Apple avoids trouble and work by always using HiDPI displays. Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward. You may personally find the output awkward, but typographers will disagree. They didn't always have high density displays. They did always have superior type rendering, with output more closely matching the underlying design. Hinting was used, but they did…
I feel like youre arguing a different point here. I agree with the other person that hooking a macOS machine to a non-HiDPI monitor makes for an awkward (Id call downright bad) font experience, due to them having removed subpixel anti aliasing a few versions ago. It was so jarring to me that I took closeup pictures of the pixels, and they were all rendered really badly on a 1440p screen, to a degree that you can't claim that typographers would disagree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#20I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.
This is great work btw.
[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595
[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...