Text Rendering Hates You
gankra.github.io
Text Rendering Hates You
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#2Another pain point on text AA: Many renderers mix up colorspaces on antialiasing. For example freetype assumes a linear colorspace when calculating the antialiased bitmap but AFAIK both GTK and QT apply it directly on sRGB without any adjusting. The result is apparently thickened fonts when displayed black on white and thinned fonts when displayed white on black.
Edit: Some background can be read on [0].
[0] https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener...
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#3Another pain point on text AA: Many renderers mix up colorspaces on antialiasing. For example freetype assumes a linear colorspace when calculating the antialiased bitmap but AFAIK both GTK and QT apply it directly on sRGB without any adjusting. The result is apparently thickened fonts when displayed black on white and thinned fonts when displayed white on black. Edit: Some background can be read on [0]. [0] https://…
I believe it's somewhat unavoidable as the fonts may also have co-evolved to work with renderers that work that way
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#4Fun fact about subpixel antialiasing: at some point, Firefox was printing the subpixels when printing PDFs displayed with PDF.js. That looked awful. I'm actually not sure whether that was fixed, as I haven't printed in years (also, I have disabled subpixel AA for a while because of my dual monitor not in the same direction setup)
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#5Another pain point on text AA: Many renderers mix up colorspaces on antialiasing. For example freetype assumes a linear colorspace when calculating the antialiased bitmap but AFAIK both GTK and QT apply it directly on sRGB without any adjusting. The result is apparently thickened fonts when displayed black on white and thinned fonts when displayed white on black. Edit: Some background can be read on [0]. [0] https://…
I believe it's somewhat unavoidable as the fonts may also have co-evolved to work with renderers that work that way
Sure, that's what stem-thickening is meant to compensate in the cited article.
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#6One man's antialiasing is another mans blur. I, for one, prefer crisp bitmap fonts.
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#7High-DPI (namely 200+ DPI, aka Retina) text rendering on desktop computers is one of the more impactful hardware developments for programmers in a while.
When you're looking at text all day every day, having every single glyph take a massive step up in fidelity (4x the pixel budget!) is not to be sneezed at.
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#8Fun fact about subpixel antialiasing: at some point, Firefox was printing the subpixels when printing PDFs displayed with PDF.js. That looked awful. I'm actually not sure whether that was fixed, as I haven't printed in years (also, I have disabled subpixel AA for a while because of my dual monitor not in the same direction setup)
I got some printed marketing material at a trade show last week. Screenshot of grey sub-pixel text, enlarged and printed in CMYK onto flyers.
Obviously blurry and color-fringed; hard to believe anyone approved that artwork or finished product.
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#9It seems that the term "subpixel" is overloaded. In one meaning the term refers to the RGB parts. In another meaning the result looks different when the text is shifted by less than a pixel, even on a monochrome screen.
Re: Text Rendering Hates You
#10"If you're in Firefox or Chrome, it looks awful"
Looks correct in Firefox 69.0.1 on Windows here. In Chrome it looks awful as described. In both the "bow" at the top overlaps the text on the previous line.