How does KDE (or is it Qt) font rendering compare?
It supports the subpixel rendering mentioned at the end i.e. rendering subpixel hint out per channel.
Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading it up, heated issue is putting it midly. That was a complete shitshow, with two gnome devs - and one from redhat specifically - not accepting the obviously awful font rendering as an issue and continuinously insulting the reporters. God I hate those type of Foss devs. And then on the other hand you have finally a seemingly great solution, despite their sabotage. So, yeah gnome?
Mmmh do you mean https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 ? Because the mentioned MR [1] discussion seems calm? [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190
Yes. The MR linked above is calm, but the mentioned background issue was not.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#53As a long-time developer against GTK (I started using it back in the 1.x days in the late 90s) this is really awesome to see. I enjoyed the side-by-side comparisons of the old vs new renderer, and especially the idea of homing in on particular letters ('T' and 'e') and extracting them, that really made the improvement clear. Cool stuff, and many thanks to the developers who keep pushing the GTK stack forwards.
against GTK? As in its philosophy? usage?
One of the definitions of "against", taken from Merriam Webster:
> 4 b: in contact with
> "leaning against the wall"
OP's code is "in contact with" the public APIs provided by GTK. That is, OP uses the GTK library.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the post using Firefox on Windows, and even though I've been aware of the font rendering controversy for a while, I was actually shocked by just how huge the difference was between the crisp, properly rendered text in the article and the font rendering in the "before" screenshot.
Yeah it's definitely an improvement, but even with the "after" screenshot I can't imagine voluntarily using this % scaled rendering. I'm going to turn into a bitmap font absolutist.
Bitmaps are great in terminal windows, but for apps like browsers where they can't be used easily, that's still fine because you can work around it.
Simply turn off anti-aliasing, and use a period-specific font that was designed for presentation without anti-aliasing such as the MS core truetype fonts (e.g. Verdana, Arial, etc.) It will look fine IF you have full hinting turned on.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If hinting makes the fonts "too thin", your display gamma is probably misconfigured. That kind of artifact is a common side-effect of graphical operations being performed in the wrong gamma space.
Yes, there is an issue with freetype where the gamma is different between otf and ttf fonts. otf will apply the gamma automatically, but for ttf you have to force stem darkening at the current time.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
i always disliked hinting aswell, but thankfully one can just disable hinting on linux, and then fonts actually look fairly similar to what osx did(~10-15 years ago)
Full hinting is a must-have if you turn AA off and use fonts that were designed to be hinted to a pixel grid.
Fonts have several distinct periods where they were designed expecting that renderers would function a certain way. File format notwithstanding, one size does not fit all. You really do need to match your font to your renderer's settings.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#57[flagged]
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There's more than two variants that you can be a fan of. I for one find both cases that you describe blurry, and can only stand truly clean, non-rescalable bitmap fonts.
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If hinting makes the fonts "too thin", your display gamma is probably misconfigured. That kind of artifact is a common side-effect of graphical operations being performed in the wrong gamma space.
I don't see how that would affect a screenshot—the difference is clearly visible in screenshots. Furthermore the differences between Mac, Linux, and Window font rendering are widely discussed on the internet. I think I just prefer the way that Apple chose to render fonts.
This blog post seems to lay out the tradeoff between, at least, Windows and Mac font rendering: https://blog.typekit.com/2010/10/15/type-rendering-operating...
Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting
#60Earlier 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?
You're right -- the default is 2, not 3.
I find 1 is a reasonable compromise in practice. I think of it as simulating a little paper ink bleed.