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Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#81

Post by nitwit005 »

mrpippy wrote: post #45

My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser. A browser that showed no text would be useless. And yet, after learning that Chromium's text looked wrong on Windows (by far the most important platform for Edge and Chrome), it took 4 years for the Chromium and/or Edge teams to fix it. 4 years of user research? 3 years to respect the user's ClearType Tuner values? Being a reg…

This is the expected downside of them abandoning Edge's rendering engine and switching to a new one. A lot of things will look slightly different. They accepted that premise from the start.

It seems unlikely someone is going to block a release because an expected thing happened.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#82

Post by wtallis »

mvdtnz wrote: post #76
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Steam Hardware Survey samples the system when Steam is launched, not while a game is playing Who's installing steam on their non-gaming computer?

How is that relevant? The question was whether the resolution figure in the survey is hardware resolution or software settings, and it's the former.

It's actually probably reporting the software-configured resolution, not the hardware capability. The important distinction is whether it's a system-wide resolution setting or a game-specific setting that may not apply to browser contexts (except for the ones used by Steam itself).

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#83

Post by wtallis »

babypuncher wrote: post #74
calebh wrote: post #29

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft's attention about this issue. [1] 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. I'm surprised that none of the display manufacturers h…

I don't think it's a big issue on Microsoft's radar because a lot of OLED screens have a high enough pixel density that the problem isn't really noticeable. The subpixel arrangements themselves have also improved in recent years, further mitigating the issue. I have a 27" 1440p 3rd gen QD-OLED panel and while I can make out some fringing if I pay real close attention to black-on-white text, it's not noticeable in gen…

If you know that your monitor is a 3rd-generation QD-OLED panel, then you probably know that text rendering was the main complaint about earlier generations of QD-OLED, and there are probably still more of those in the wild than ones as recent as yours.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#84

Post by Marsymars »

wtallis wrote: post #43
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just ditch ClearType and use grayscale AA like Acrobat used to have. PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter.

> PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter. Have you looked at the desktop monitor market recently? There are still a lot of models that are not substantially higher PPI than what was normal 20 years ago. PCPartPicker currently shows 1333 monitors in-stock across the stores it tracks. Of those, only 216 have a vertical resolution of at least 2160 pixels (the height of a 4k d…

Asides from Steam, consider one of the biggest markets for displaying text on the Windows OS - low-end office PCs. My entire company runs on Dell’s cheapest 24” 1080p monitors. I don’t expect that will change until Dell stops selling 1080p monitors.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#86

Post by perching_aix »

wtallis wrote: post #52
jayd16 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just saying they're not as bright or is there something more there?

On OLEDs, high levels of ambient light hitting the monitor tends to wash out blacks, making them appear dark gray, thereby subverting one of the most clear-cut advantages of OLED.

I don't see this on any of my phones or wearables. I'm aware QD-OLED in particular has this weakness, but haven't heard of or experienced any other OLEDs having this issue.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#87

Post by alternatetwo »

dist-epoch wrote: post #23
alternatetwo wrote: post #13

Chromium can't render fonts at all after they got rid of GDI rendering. Just compare Verdana 12pt in Word/LibreOffice and Chrome, they're not seriously trying to tell me that's the correct font? The letters don't even look the same. Left is Firefox with GDI, right is Chrome: https://i.redd.it/0fk50cgcexie1.png

Firefox does not use GDI, it used DirectWrite which is GPU accelerated.

It most certainly uses GDI for Verdana. Firefox tried to disable that by overwriting the previous default setting for gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families and gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size, but restoring them fixed that.

Also this is not important. What's important is that DirectWrite does not render this font correctly, if you compare it with LibreOffice or Word.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#88

Post by perching_aix »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #70
calebh wrote: post #29

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft's attention about this issue. [1] 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. I'm surprised that none of the display manufacturers h…

> 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.…

> Unfortunately, that ( I find this fascinating, because I recall school textbooks having visible dots, but I'm yet to experience what people refer to as "oh my god I'm seeing the pixel!".

It further doesn't help that when seated at a typical distance (30° hfov) from a ~23" 16:9 FHD display (96 ppi), you get a match (60 ppd) for the visual acuity you're measured for when an optometrist tells you that you have a 20/20 eyesight.

It's been of course demonstrated that eyesight better than 20/20 is most certainly real, that the density of the cones in one's eye also indicates a much finer top resolution, etc., but characterizing 96 ppi as so utterly inadequate will never not strike me as quite the overstatement.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#89

Post by DeathRay2K »

wtallis wrote: post #82
mvdtnz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that relevant? The question was whether the resolution figure in the survey is hardware resolution or software settings, and it's the former.

It's actually probably reporting the software-configured resolution, not the hardware capability. The important distinction is whether it's a system-wide resolution setting or a game-specific setting that may not apply to browser contexts (except for the ones used by Steam itself).

What makes you think that it’s more likely reporting a software-configured resolution? It is after all a hardware survey, and focused on what user hardware supports.

Re: Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

#90

Post by BearOso »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #62
BearOso wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy. With the stripe layouts, all you have to do is increase the horizontal or vertical resolution when rasterizing, then map that to subpixels. There's no current methodology or algorithms to deal with triangular layouts, etc. And OLED's subpixel layouts have been moving around yearly with both LG and Samsung. Those two even have RGB stripe layouts forecast for the future.

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 block…

LG was RWBG, but newer panels use RGWB, which works better with subpixel.

I wasn't aware of the FreeType harmony approach, but it looks like there's some problems, like no FIR filtering. The rapidly changing subpixel arrangements would also be difficult to accommodate. They'd have to have a new DDC command or something to poll the panel's subpixel matrix. I imagine by the time they got that through the standards bodies that RGB OLED would be ready.

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