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Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#41

Post by nolok »

calebh wrote: post #29

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft's attention about this issue. [1] The subpixel layout of OLED screens is different than the the traditional layout, so text ends up looking pretty bad. Patching ClearType would be the first step to fixing this issue. I'm surprised that none of the display manufacturers h…

> At the present moment OLED screens are the superior display technology

Until the lighting condition move away from "99% perfect" and then it falls way below QLED.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#42

Post by crazygringo »

zokier wrote: post #21

One of those things that to me is frustrating is how there is no clear unambiguous definition of what is correct in font rendering. Presumably typeface designers have some specific intent on how heavy strokes and stems are, but then that somehow becomes ambiguous when a font gets rendered on screen. Asking for user feedback feels kinda pointless in that context, does your average user know what some random font shoul…

There is actually a definition of what is correct, and I'm pretty sure Adobe Photoshop does it in one of its modes.

It's just pure grayscale antialiasing of the underlying letterform, with the correct gamma used by the monitor. Or subpixel rendering if you want, as long as it matches your screen's actual LCD layout.

The issue is that that's not necessarily what's most readable. So various forms of hinting and darkening can be introduced to improve readability, and all of that is of course entirely subjective.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#43

Post by wtallis »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #30
calebh wrote: post #29

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft's attention about this issue. [1] The subpixel layout of OLED screens is different than the the traditional layout, so text ends up looking pretty bad. Patching ClearType would be the first step to fixing this issue. I'm surprised that none of the display manufacturers h…

They should just ditch ClearType and use grayscale AA like Acrobat used to have. PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter.

> PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter.

Have you looked at the desktop monitor market recently? There are still a lot of models that are not substantially higher PPI than what was normal 20 years ago. PCPartPicker currently shows 1333 monitors in-stock across the stores it tracks. Of those, only 216 have a vertical resolution of at least 2160 pixels (the height of a 4k display). Zero of those 4k monitors are smaller than 27", so none of them are getting close to 200 PPI.

On the low-PPI side of things, there are 255 models with a resolution of 2560x1440 and a diagonal size of at least 27". One standard size and resolution combination that was common over a decade ago still outnumbers the entirety of the high-PPI market segment.

If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey results, their statistics indicate an even worse situation, with over half of gaming users still stuck at 1920x1080.

If subpixel antialiasing made sense during the first decade after LCDs replaced CRT, then it still matters today.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#44

Post by BearOso »

> After a lot of user research, members of both Edge and Chromium determined that a contrast value of 1.0 closely matched the text rendering of pre-Chromium Edge and looked consistent compared to other native Windows applications.

So they decided that not deliberately lowering contrast will fix the contrast problem. So this basically stems from that annoying designer trend of grey text on grey backgrounds that was in turn based on the false assumption that our displays have infinite contrast.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#45

Post by mrpippy »

My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser. A browser that showed no text would be useless. And yet, after learning that Chromium's text looked wrong on Windows (by far the most important platform for Edge and Chrome), it took 4 years for the Chromium and/or Edge teams to fix it.

4 years of user research?

3 years to respect the user's ClearType Tuner values?

Being a regression from pre-Chromium Edge, this should have been a release blocker on Chromium-based Edge. Instead, text looked bad for 4 years.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#46

Post by BearOso »

calebh wrote: post #29

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft's attention about this issue. [1] The subpixel layout of OLED screens is different than the the traditional layout, so text ends up looking pretty bad. Patching ClearType would be the first step to fixing this issue. I'm surprised that none of the display manufacturers h…

It's not that easy. With the stripe layouts, all you have to do is increase the horizontal or vertical resolution when rasterizing, then map that to subpixels. There's no current methodology or algorithms to deal with triangular layouts, etc. And OLED's subpixel layouts have been moving around yearly with both LG and Samsung. Those two even have RGB stripe layouts forecast for the future.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#47

Post by vlovich123 »

wtallis wrote: post #43
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just ditch ClearType and use grayscale AA like Acrobat used to have. PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter.

> PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter. Have you looked at the desktop monitor market recently? There are still a lot of models that are not substantially higher PPI than what was normal 20 years ago. PCPartPicker currently shows 1333 monitors in-stock across the stores it tracks. Of those, only 216 have a vertical resolution of at least 2160 pixels (the height of a 4k d…

> If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey results, their statistics indicate an even worse situation, with over half of gaming users still stuck at 1920x1080.

Are these the natural resolution of the monitor or just what people play games at? I suspect the latter because the most popular gards are more mid level / entry level cards. The 1650 is still at #4.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#49

Post by wtallis »

vlovich123 wrote: post #47
wtallis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter. Have you looked at the desktop monitor market recently? There are still a lot of models that are not substantially higher PPI than what was normal 20 years ago. PCPartPicker currently shows 1333 monitors in-stock across the stores it tracks. Of those, only 216 have a vertical resolution of at least 2160 pixels (the height of a 4k d…

> If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey results, their statistics indicate an even worse situation, with over half of gaming users still stuck at 1920x1080. Are these the natural resolution of the monitor or just what people play games at? I suspect the latter because the most popular gards are more mid level / entry level cards. The 1650 is still at #4.

The Steam Hardware Survey samples the system when Steam is launched, not while a game is playing. For most users, Steam starts when they log in to the computer. I think the unfortunate reality is that a very large number of gamers are still using 1920x1080 as their everyday ordinary screen resolution for their primary display, though a few percent at least are probably on laptops small enough that 1920x1080 is somewhat reasonable.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#50

Post by martinsnow »

feverzsj wrote: post #40

Chrome's font rendering issue on Windows has been known for more than a decade. Turns out all you need to do is reading proper gamma/contrast values from register. But they didn't fix it in Skia, so most Skia based projects still have shitty font rendering on Windows. Here is the meta issue tracker: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40037626

If i understand correctly, chrome is using windows own font rendering capabilities which should be the preferred method?
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