81–86 of 86 posts
In the announcement, they explicitly state that the performance changes will make Arial and other very common fonts render less well. Is this a sound decision, in an age where these fonts are still very widely explicitly used?
Arial looks ugly no matter what rendering hacks you apply. The sooner it will be extinct the better.
Autohinting is hard, especially for ideographs. My hinter even used differential evolution to calculate how strokes should be placed. (link: github.com/be5invis/sfdhanautohint)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a mandatory feature. It provides options that it didn't have before without having lost anything.
Nikolaus Waxweiler writes in the announcement that he was led "to strip the v38 Infinality code to the bare minimum and remove all configurability in the name of speed and simplicity".
Does this mean that now Java-based GUI software (e.g. Android Studio) run using OpenJDK will display much better fonts?
Recent versions of IntelliJ are bundled with a patched version of OpenJDK though, so that particular case should not be a problem anymore.
Oh no, why would they do this? You could already achieve something similar (and superior IMO) with the old FreeType by enabling "loose hinting" (ignoring hinting in x-direction) and using RGBA subpixel hinting. Ignoring horizontal hinting only really works when you have subpixel hinting, because of the ~tripled horizontal resolution. I don't understand why anybody (MS, the FreeType devs, ...) would choose DirectWrite…
Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet. † https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further-ev...
I believe part of the reason is that it was never fully compatible with screen rotation, often still assuming RGB order from text-left to text-right. Another part would be that the world is moving towards much higher resolution displays, where the effect of subpixel rendering is negligible.