Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

LG used WRGB striping.

Also, this isn't true? The blur busters founder (Mark Rejhon) has worked a lot on this exact issue and already has defined shaders and approaches to arbitrary subpixel geometry text shaders in the PowerToys repos (no thanks to Microsoft).

His approach is based on the Freestyle HarmonyLCD subpixel rendering approach which has supported non-striped layouts for over 6 years.

We're currently blocked by Microsoft, who continue to ignore everyone on this issue despite Mark's best efforts. Core Windows shaders need to be modified and he can't really proceed without cooperation, without injecting a security risk for anyone who uses his solution.

Plenty of gaming monitors are native 1080p. Compared to a higher-res normal monitor at the same price, you usually get a higher refresh rate and better pixel response times. Or you used to, anyway—looks like that part of the spec sheet has been effectively exhausted in the recent couple of years, and manufacturers looking to sell something as “gaming gear” are slowly moving on to other parts of it. As long as they’re raising the baseline for all of us, I’ve no beef with them.

Do you genuinely believe those 4 years were spent writing code?

This is why wet behind the ears tech boys can't be trusted any more. They really think that the hardest part of software, the thing that slows us down, is writing code. Really!?

Kid, I'll offer you some free advice. Writing the code is the least difficult part. Deciding what and how to write (and what not to bother with) is a critical step that has nothing to do with writing code. Designing the architecture, ensuring it's correct, leaving something well written and maintainable for the next grunt, documenting code so it's easy to understand and to review, ensuring your code supports all the desired use cases and interactions with users and other code/apps/etc, iterating on it until it's polished, and then actually maintaining it and fixing bugs that are inevitably going to be there if the code is sufficiently expansive. Those are just a few of the things that aren't "grinding code" as you want to make software.

Read a programming book for Pete's sake, and stop assuming you can just fake it till you make it because you are part of what's destroying software for the world and it's got to stop.

Yes you're correct. My memory is a bit fuzzy but it the fact is in the article

> While Skia uses DirectWrite on Windows for certain functionality such as font lookup, the final text rasterization is actually handled directly by Skia. And one major factor in the "washed out" feedback from users is the internal contrast and gamma settings for text rendering.

> Two main differences in text contrast and gamma values were uncovered between Edge's Chromium-based engine and its prior engine. First, Skia does not pick up text contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Tuner. Secondly, it uses different default values for text contrast and gamma than those used by Edge's DirectWrite-based text stack.

I was debugging blurry text in windows at a previous job where we used electron to develop a softphone application and could not understand why the lighter text was harder to read on windows. That would settle the debate.

I hope they will come up with better integration with windows so these differences will disappear.

> 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.

Patching ClearType is unfortunately not as straightforward as it should have been. In an ideal world, you just change the sampling kernel your rasterizer uses to match the subpixel layout (with perceptual corrections) and you’re done. In our world, it takes hackery of Lovecraftian levels of horrifying to display crisp text using a vector font on a monitor with a resolution so pitiful a typographer from centuries ago would have been embarrassed to touch it. Unfortunately, that ( One of the parts of that hackery is distorting outlines via hinting. That distortion is conventionally hand-tuned by font designers on the kind of display they envision their users having, so in a homogeneous landscape it ends up tied to the specifics of both ClearType’s subpixel grid (that has been fixed since 2001) and Microsoft’s rasterizer (which is even older). Your sampling kernel is now part of your compatibility promise.

The Raster Tragedy website[1] goes into much more detail with much more authority than I ever could lay claim to, except it primarily views the aforementioned hackery as a heroic technical achievement whereas I am more concerned with how it has propagated the misery of 96 dpi and sustained inadequate displays for so long we’re still struggling to be rid of said displays and still dealing with the sequelae of said misery.

[1] http://rastertragedy.com/