Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

Font rendering in GTK 3 was pretty good, then they broke it in GTK 4, and even with new renderers fonts are not up to par with good old GTK 3.

I'll repeat my wish for a mass-production Bayer matrix TV to offer alternative firmware/a special mode where it goes _very_ dumb (though an optional overdrive setting (assuming it's an LCD) as a toggle or slider or so would be welcome; it's a massive pain to DIY and shouldn't get on the way of anything but FreeSync/VRR) and claims to be a monochrome panel at the true native resolution & bit depth on DisplayPort.

You'd want to render to that grid; then apply bayering fused with color mapping. No need to transmit 3x the data over the cable. And with a hint of sufficient software support (I think the high DPI stuff might (almost?) suffice already!), I'd actually prefer such a screen over a traditional vertical bars of RGB (or BGR, as I'm currently suffering; sadly the thermal design of the screen won't allow me to safely just rotate it to"wrong" landscape) LCD monitor... provided both have the same number of subpixels.

Probably bonus for a 4th deep cyan pixel color in place of a duplicate green to get a wider gamut. Or something similar in spirit.

A device like this would allow hobby developers to bring the software/driver support up to "daily driver, no regrets" levels.

Similarly I still wonder why no OLED seems to have shipped a "camera-based motion/pan/defocus self-calibrated" burn-in scan& compensate function where you just every ~100 hours move a cheap camera on front of the screen following the on-screen movement directions, to mechanically create an opportunity for the cheap sensor to be calibrated, and then use this freshly calibrated brightness sensor to map the OLED panel and make up for that the exact burn-in is very hard to simulate, but is required precisely to compensate/pre-distort without leaving visible residuals from incomplete/imperfect cancellation between the pre-distortion and the burned-in pattern.

Made me think of this for some reason:

https://building.enlyze.com/posts/targeting-25-years-of-wind...

Target from NT4 (up to Windows 11, I suppose) with LLVM and Visual Studio.

I don’t have anything expert to add here except this is somehow a shockingly difficult problem.

When I boot into windows, the fonts especially in some applications look horrible and blurry because of my high DPI monitor. Windows has like 10 settings you can try to tweak high dpi fonts and man none of them look good. I think my Linux boot on the same machine has much better font smoothness and of course the MacBook is perfect.

Somehow most windows systems I see on people’s desks now look blurry as shit. It didn’t use to be this way.

I really don’t understand why high dpi monitors cause (rather than solve) this problem and I suspect windows has some legacy application considerations to trade off against but man - windows used to be the place you’d go to give your eyes a break after Linux and now it’s worse!

I realize I am ranting against windows here which is the most cliched thing ever but really come on it’s like right in your face!

I don't think it's the high DPI screens themselves that cause this on Windows, rather the fonts have changed.

I'm pretty sure they used to be bit mapped, or had excellent hinting. Now that high dpi is common, maybe they figured that wasn't needed anymore. And indeed, on my 24", 4k monitor at "200%", windows is pretty sharp if I start it that way. If I change it while running, it becomes a shit-show. But when running at 100% on a FHD 14" laptop, sharpness is clearly lacking.

Regarding the Linux situation, yes, it's subjectively better on that same laptop. But it depends a lot on the fonts used. Some are a blurry / rainbowy mess. However, on Linux, I run everything at 100% and just zoom as needed if the text is too small (say on the above 24" screen).