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Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io

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Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#151

Post by lifthrasiir »

gumby wrote: post #128
kccqzy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh, vertical writing in Korea was famously abolished decades ago when the Chosun Ilbo, a prominent conservative newspaper notorious for its love with now almost dead hanja uses and vertical writing, finally gave up with that in March 2, 1999.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#152

Post by _fbpt »

leni536 wrote: post #36
z3t4 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I strongly disagree, also the way the article describes subpixel antialiasing is not entirely accurate. The thing is the boundaries between pixels don't actually exist, it's just a convention so we can address individual pixels and subpixels within them. But these subpixels are not at the same position within the pixels and this needs to be taken into account for antialiasing. Also regarding hiDPI: I know that you ju…

From my own reading experience, I found that individually lit "RGB" clusters tend to be white, wherease "GBR" is fuzzy(?) and "BRG" tends to appear purple on the left but green on the right. This is because the green subpixel contributes most to perceived brightness. I think it's fortunate that most displays locate them in the center.

I tried reproducing the results using actual Cleartype with black lines on white backgrounds, and "orange-blue" vertical lines appear blurrier than "black" vertical lines.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#153

Post by _fbpt »

Why do both Windows and FreeType "faux italic" tilt the font too much for my liking? And why is the "point of zero tilt" at the baseline rather than 25-50% of the way up? This makes faux-italic text appear to be too far to the right. I feel like changing these 2 would make faux italic much less obtrusive.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#154

Post by enriquto »

chrisseaton wrote: post #46
enriquto wrote: post #6

One man's antialiasing is another mans blur. I, for one, prefer crisp bitmap fonts.

Where do you find bitmap fonts that are high resolution enough for modern displays?

No idea, sorry, I have never used a "modern" display. Yet terminus and the standard bitmap X fonts go to quite large sizes. They are certainly readable even when using ridiculously tiny pixels.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#155

Post by tripzilch »

Really fascinating read. It reminded me of Tom Scott's video on Numberphile, about time zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Maybe it's the way Tom presents it, but I do get the distinct impression that (fully) dealing with time zones is an even more maddening incomprehensible quagmire of a task than rendering text as laid out in this article.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#156

Post by bitwize »

reaperducer wrote: post #118
jacobush wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-%...

Framework was the tits back in the day. It was basically Emacs for the office. It built on the core concept of a frame the way Emacs built on the buffer -- except frames could contain other frames, which is how Framework composed spreadsheets and documents with multiple subsections.

Like Emacs, Framework was programmable in a Lisp-like scripting language called FRED. In fact you could attach FRED macros to any frame, and they would be saved along with your work.

All this on an 8088-based PC (or 80186-based Tandy 2000).

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#157

Post by gumby »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #151
gumby wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Mongolian, Korean, Uyghur... If you add support for archaic systems you have to handle vertical bottom to top and boustrophedon too.

Uh, vertical writing in Korea was famously abolished decades ago when the Chosun Ilbo, a prominent conservative newspaper notorious for its love with now almost dead hanja uses and vertical writing, finally gave up with that in March 2, 1999.

It’s true — actually I thought it had been abandoned in the 70s but I figured that was recent enough not to be “archaic” like some of the obscure bottom-to-top scripts.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#158

Post by 80386 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #145
littlestymaar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's actually Sean. Pronounced shawn. Be thankful we didn't get more from Gaelic, where "Laoghaire" is pronounced leery. :) Don't agree US English makes it easier, it's just differently idiosyncratic. Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p If I hear in the US "cull err" and go to spell, I don't end up at color, hearing "sell fon…

> Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p

http://zompist.com/spell.html

Initial 'gh' can never be pronounced 'f', final 'ti' can never be pronounced 'sh', and 'o' is only pronounced 'i' in one word.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#159

Post by ComputerGuru »

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.

That’s not the worst for sure. Now not packing a proper italicized version leaving the text renderer to draw each glyph at an angle to make oblique text (which is the difference between oblique and italic) for a truly hideous result.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#160

Post by littlestymaar »

bsder wrote: post #150
littlestymaar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 really thirsty)… I think I spent a whole 5 minutes before a French Canadian arrived and saved my day.

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