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

State of Text Rendering 2024

behdad.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#51

Post by Findecanor »

heftig wrote: post #5

I'm not sure how this gets rendered, but the lack of hinting makes it a strain to read. What irony that an article about progress in text rendering has such awful rendering quality. PS: That is in Firefox. In Chrome it uses what appears to be a bitmap font, which is much worse.

For me in Chromium, I got the error message "Some fonts could not be loaded" and the body text was in an actually readable font, unlike in Firefox.

I got annoyed that the page hijacked right click and key navigation, so I wanted to print to PDF — which didn't work. Chrome printed a single blank page. Firefox managed to print, but also only a single page, and when zoomed in the font got interpolated (= blurry), instead of being more readable.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#52

Post by [deleted] »

hi_dang_ wrote: post #4

Nice article but sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the state of linux audio drivers, or the state of linux text rendering. It’s very easy to see when FreeType is used because it just looks off in a few, but significant ways. I’ve used it with and without Harf. DirectWrite has been a joy by comparison.

[deleted]

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#53

Post by Findecanor »

behdad wrote: post #13
KerrAvon wrote: post #6

making your article force a tiny, fixed, unchangeable font size seems like a good way to convince people that you should be nowhere near text rendering infrastructure

Browser zoom works fine for me. Does it not for you?

The page fights against zooming by reducing the text size to compensate.

I can zoom in somewhat only if I press Ctrl + fast enough many times in succession, but then it is easy to overshoot.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#55

Post by zamadatix »

Findecanor wrote: post #53
behdad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser zoom works fine for me. Does it not for you?

The page fights against zooming by reducing the text size to compensate. I can zoom in somewhat only if I press Ctrl + fast enough many times in succession, but then it is easy to overshoot.

Interesting, when I zoom in to 300% the T in TLDR is exactly 3x taller than when at 100%. Seems to be an embedded Google Doc though so the canvas does a weird recentering jerk on viewport size changes.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#56

Post by account42 »

SSLy wrote: post #46
slimsag wrote: post #22

> Moreover, the fontations platform, which is the Rust framework Oxidize is producing, will unify font compilation and consumption, reducing the number of places new font-format features need to be implemented from three (FontTools, FreeType, and HarfBuzz) to one (Fontations), which would reduce development cost and overhead. Will FreeType and HarfBuzz remain supported as C/C++ projects long-term, I wonder? Asking as…

> doesn't want to introduce a dependency on a Rust compiler you can link against pre-built .dll/.so/.dylib from your C++ code base.

That only helps you if all your targets are also actively supported by upstream. It also limits optimization opportunities, mainly removing parts of the library your code doesn't need.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#57

Post by account42 »

techn00 wrote: post #30

To everybody complaining about the awful text rendering, it's literally in the first paragraph > [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.]

Acknowledging the irony doesn't remove it. It's yet another case of putting developer convenience over end user experience. Which for something provided for free is more than you paid for but still a subpar result that can be criticized.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#58

Post by vanderZwan »

> [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.]

Have you tried Observable? Their online notebook has live team editing built in, and the option to comment on cells, as well as fork and merge notebooks with suggested edits. However, it uses markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor (although I did create some tagged template wrappers for djot and markdeep as possible alternatives). On the plus side it's really easy to write interactive demos!

They're kind of pivoting their product at the moment though, so I'm not sure how easy it is to get into the notebook part these days.

[0] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/djot

[1] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/wrapping-markdeep-into-...

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#59

Post by dgreensp »

Wait, so the idea is in the future, fonts will contain arbitrary full-color vector and bitmap images, they will contain Web Assembly code that needs to be run, and they will be streamed over the network? I’m probably missing a few other proposals, as I only skimmed.

Did anyone stop to consider if this is really necessary? The author makes it sound like he has used his influence steadily over the years to make fonts more complicated. “In year X, I proposed that fonts be able to do Y, because why not?” I get that text shaping is so complex, that in terms of open source, there is just Harfbuzz. I’m not an expert in this area. But I don’t think it’s a good thing if “font standards” are constantly getting new features, like web standards, and font renderers are like mini browser engines, where the sheer scope and number of features and rate of new features keeps everyone using the same codebases.

Re: State of Text Rendering 2024

#60

Post by bbkane »

vanderZwan wrote: post #58

> [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.] Have you tried Observable? Their online notebook has live team editing built in, and the option to…

Tangent, but I just found Observable. How are they pivoting their product?
Post reply on HN