Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

blog.gtk.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 117 posts

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#2

Post by unwind »

As a long-time developer against GTK (I started using it back in the 1.x days in the late 90s) this is really awesome to see.

I enjoyed the side-by-side comparisons of the old vs new renderer, and especially the idea of homing in on particular letters ('T' and 'e') and extracting them, that really made the improvement clear.

Cool stuff, and many thanks to the developers who keep pushing the GTK stack forwards.

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#4

Post by ho_schi »

These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks!

Background:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190

Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are common and Gtk4 cares about. The whole topic caused a heated issue before - because it depends on your own vision, taste and hardware.

Apple avoids trouble and work by always using HiDPI displays. Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward.

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#5

Post by DinaCoder99 »

ho_schi wrote: post #4

These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…

> Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward.

Ironically for "always expose relevant options through system settings" Apple, you can still access font smoothing via command line, e.g. "defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3". You can use 0-3 where 0 disables it (default) and 3 uses "strong" hinting, with 1 and 2 in between.

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#6

Post by mmmrk »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #5
ho_schi wrote: post #4

These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…

> Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward. Ironically for "always expose relevant options through system settings" Apple, you can still access font smoothing via command line, e.g. "defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3". You can use 0-3 where 0 disables it (default) and 3 uses "strong" hinting, with 1 and 2 in between.

Nit: the option does not hint, it emboldens text, as in, smears it a bit to make it appear thicker. And I think the default is actually 2?

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#7

Post by onli »

ho_schi wrote: post #4

These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…

Reading it up, heated issue is putting it midly. That was a complete shitshow, with two gnome devs - and one from redhat specifically - not accepting the obviously awful font rendering as an issue and continuinously insulting the reporters. God I hate those type of Foss devs.

And then on the other hand you have finally a seemingly great solution, despite their sabotage. So, yeah gnome?

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#8

Post by azornathogron »

ggm wrote: post #3

Have the patents expired?

If you're talking about the TrueType bytecode patents, yes, they expired nearly 14 years ago: https://freetype.org/patents.html

But I don't think that's relevant here anyway, since the article refers to the auto-hinter which as far as I know was never patent-encumbered.

Re: Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

#9

Post by robinsonb5 »

onli wrote: post #7
ho_schi wrote: post #4

These are good news! I think this was a tough ride for the Gtk developers. Thanks! Background: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190 Basically gtk-hint-font-metrics=1 was needed with Gtk4 on non-HiDPI displays to get crisp text. Thanks to the change from 6190 above it is already automatically applied, when appropriate depending on which display is used. Mixed setups with multiple displays are commo…

Reading it up, heated issue is putting it midly. That was a complete shitshow, with two gnome devs - and one from redhat specifically - not accepting the obviously awful font rendering as an issue and continuinously insulting the reporters. God I hate those type of Foss devs. And then on the other hand you have finally a seemingly great solution, despite their sabotage. So, yeah gnome?

I read the post using Firefox on Windows, and even though I've been aware of the font rendering controversy for a while, I was actually shocked by just how huge the difference was between the crisp, properly rendered text in the article and the font rendering in the "before" screenshot.
Post reply on HN