Font Rendering

Come on down to the font rendering thread and share your configs. I'm using Fedora on Gnome with Greyscale subpixel rendering and slight hinting. Default Google Chrome with msfonts.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

fucking trash font rendering. id rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon than look at that shit all day.

ok

>Greyscale subpixel rendering
Sure doesn't look like it.

Also literally spreads that capital I out over three horizontal pixels. Literal shit.

This is my own. Debian default settings, no tweaks whatsoever.

>Sure doesn't look like it.
Woops you're right
looks like arse, zoom out a bit.

Zoomed out version.

PROTIP for highdps OSX users: unless things have changed recently, Apple still has sub-pixel AA turned on even with retina displays. Not only is this unnecessary and somewhat distorting, but it degrades quality whenever you're in a non-integer scaling factor.

So turn it off for much clearer/nicer text.

why the fuck would you upload a compressed jpg my man

that looks like shit to me. I don't know much about font rendering, but I can't STAND anything but how Ubuntu's is.

I tried Solus a month or two ago and the fonts looked kind of like that. Very sharp and thin lettering, looks almost like some monospaced font you'd see in xterm.

Look at this shit. Compare the vertical lines in the lowercase "a", "f", "l" and notice how they're all different and inconsistent. Fuck, the "n" even has different appearances for its two vertical lines. How can you even live with yourself?

Your screenshot has the exact same problems I pointed out in . Just look at that "m". Three vertical lines, three different appearances. Into the trash it goes.

too thin for me desu famalam. Whatever floats your boat though, your display may be compensating the thinness
Constructive criticism, suggest some configs to solve the issue you're complaining about.

>They still don't have a high PPI display
smdh

the utter state of being poor

UwU

Just because it's high PPI doesn't mean subpixel rendering is unnecessary. It keeps the fonts the proper weight, gives them more resolution to work with, and makes them easier to read in general.

I sincerely hope that's a single window on a 5k mac and not a horizontal monitor set up vertically.

>Three vertical lines, three different appearances.
Is this really what people talk about when they are sperging over font rendering? I don't ever zoom into the actual letters and compare the pixels, I'm just concerned with how easy on the eyes it is for reading long pages of text, so anti aliasing, hinting, and default system font.

If you want every letter to be perfect like that just use a bitmap font. For me those are extremely offensive to the eyes though. Very sharp, whereas mine are antialiased/blurred which seems to help with the contrast on the page

>too thin for me desu famalam.
I do invite you to observe in , on the other hand, how not only are all vertical lines the same identical 100% opaque 1-pixel line, but even the arches of the "m" are identical, and the corners of the "o" are perfectly symmetrical.

>I don't ever zoom into the actual letters and compare the pixels
Neither do I, it's more than well visible to the naked I. I just made a zoomed-in image to illustrate the point more clearly. I can't look at the screenshot without wanting to see it in the trashcan.

I did see it and It still looks like arse both zoomed in and out. As I said, it may be because of your display and that's fine but it still looks shitty on mine.

shit that's much better. good old 1080p is showing its age.

naked eye*

It'll distort the weight, no? (vs. just using grey-scale AA)

Also phones/tablets (AFAIK) have never used sub-pixel AA (to allow for screen rotation), so it looks weird seeing it on a PC these days.

OSX can take those nice single-window screenshots, notice the properly alpha'd shadow.

Ah yeah I kind of see it now, I didn't ever notice the asymmetry of the legs of letters like that. I still prefer mine to yours though, it's hard to put my finger on it but for one that's way too thin. Yes the rendering of the letters legs are slightly uneven on mine, but I still find it comfier+easier on the eyes than the super thin sharp font you have.

Just looks like yours avoids the problem of slightly uneven anti aliasing but not having barely anti aliasing at all.

>Just looks like yours avoids the problem of slightly uneven anti aliasing but not having barely anti aliasing at all.
It has anti-aliasing exactly where it matters, that is at non-straight shapes. Whereas the straightness of the straight shapes is preserved as it should be by being perfectly pixel-aligned.

It's a 5k iMac desu.

Considering it's the default setting you're probably fucking up the weight with greyscale only.

Phones and tablets don't use it because they are expected to rotate. Languages like English have most of their detail on the horizontal axis, which is the way typical subpixels are arranged. It looks "off" when rotated. You can try it yourself by rotating your monitor and changing the subpixel orientation. Then again I've only done that once a long time ago so I could be wrong.

>Stylig Myson
a man of taste I see
>5k iMac
a man of supreme taste I see
>anime
I'd like to see your feet.

>the straightness of the straight shapes is preserved as it should be by being perfectly pixel-aligned.
You may be right that yours is more 'correct' to the original font shapes but for some reason still looks like shit.

this guy has the best rendering in the thread so far IMO, though the very high DPI could be deceptive. I'd like to see what his looks like at 1920x1080 or lower like my screen.

what is this software on the right? the safebooru page doesnt look as aesthetics

This is the best you can do without having a high PPI screen.

My feet are disgusting. I'm a male.

>still looks like shit
Except it doesn't, of course. You're just so used to shit that they can't make out excellence when put right in front of your eyes.

ahoviewer

IIRC the reason Mac and PC text looks so different on low-rez displays is that Macs use "position correct" rendering, while Windows/ClearType agressively forces things into the pixel grid. Hence, old Macs having 'soft' text but consistent weight and spacing, while Windows text looks jumbly but is sharper.

Thankfully with enough dpi we don't have the tradeoff.

I can remember always installing "mactype" or something like that on Windows computers to make the text not look like shit back in the day.

When Safari for Windows came out it did all its own text rendering (the Mac way) and triggered a lot of Windows users for looking weird/wrong/blurry.

>They still don't have a high PPI display
A high PPI display is just an excuse for not having to render fonts properly. At high enough resolutions, any rendering will look okay.

MacOS preserves typeface geometry. Text should look the same on screen as it would if it was printed. Windows (and most Linux DEs) use hinting, which automagically changes the fonts to better align to the pixel grid. This makes things sharper, but you lose accurate geometry.

Both have their upsides and downsides, and you can still tell the difference between sharp linux font rendering with hinting and blurry MacOS fonts even with a high PPI display.

>This is the best you can do without having a high PPI screen.
haha wow I'm really starting to notice that now. has never bothered me with videos or games but I'm finally starting to see the appeal of a higher resolution monitor. I'm still using 1360x768.

>Text should look the same on screen as it would if it was printed.
What a stupid idea. If I wanted nice printed text, I'd print it. If I'm reading it on a screen, of course I want it rendered to look good on that screen.

lol if u think mashing fonts into a pixel grid looks good

>My feet are disgusting. I'm a male.
it's a meme my dude, any idea on how to configure my fonts (Fedora) to be more like yours

If you're not going to use MacOS you'll just be wasting money. Windows and Linux suck at rendering 4k. With Windows half the shit you use will actually be blurrier since it's rendering at a lower resolution, and then upscales bilinearly which looks horrible.

Typefaces are designed the way they are to be readable. Typography is way older than computers, and some of the fonts you see on a daily basis (not just on computers) are hundreds of years old. Here's one example
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond

I haven't used Linux since 2014.

>1360x768
Seriously stop torturing yourself.

$30 chinkphones/tablets have highdpi displays.

Looks better than first making a print representation of it and then mashing that into a pixel grid desu.

>I haven't used Linux since 2014.
Alright, thanks anyways user-kun~

if your OS has good rendering then it won't try to mash it

>Typefaces are designed the way they are to be readable.
Of course, but rendering them on different devices places different criteria for legibility on them.

Then isn't a problem.

it is if you use windows or have hinting turned on in linux

High PPI displays have enough pixels that it doesn't matter much. It's not high enough that you couldn't tell the difference between a good print and your screen, but it's high enough that you don't have to mangle the geometry to have sharp text. Hinting only makes sense on lower PPI displays.

>if your OS has good rendering then it won't try to mash it

>If you're not going to use MacOS you'll just be wasting money. Windows and Linux suck at rendering 4k.
I agree 100%. Most of the applications I use I'd be way to scared to even start in 4k, having witnessed DPI hell in Linux using a 1920x1080 Microsoft Surface (very small screen). But I will probably just get a 1080p screen which is the same size as my current 1360x768 monitor next chance I get. Probably will get one in a few weeks.

Of course, but not all displays are high PPI.

OS X font rendering makes the other operating systems look so fucking bad. Why doesn't Microsoft and Redhat hire some respectable typographers and graphic designers instead of the poo in the loo trash they currently employ. The state of their font rendering and UI design is abysmal.

>tfw can't figure out why some sites use fallback fonts
4c uses fucking dejavu and i can't uninstall it

>tfw the best way to browse the web is only available on Macs

>tiny screen
>uses huge font on it
It's like you want to hardly be able to fit any text at all on it.

Well if you have a low PPI screen hinting is your best best just so it's not blurry. There's no reason to use hinting on a high PPI display though.

Because most people don't have a high PPI monitor. Unhinted fonts look blurry on a normal screen.

Linux has actually been getting worse in the last decade so his point still stands.

I dunno, it's tough. It feels like i'm going blind, but maybe I just use it too far away from my face.
this is 14, down from 16.

OS X has had far superior font rendering since before high PPI monitors were even available. Every respected typographer on the planet uses OS X and Windows font rendering is widely accepted as inaccurate and generally terrible. In most cases Linux is even worse.

You can have accurate typefaces or sharp typefaces on low PPI displays, not both at once. Most people would rather have sharp.

Linux and Windows mostly work, but ONLY integer scaling, i.e. 2x.

The problem is Windows/Linux users are poorfags and buy these intermediate DPI displays, instead of making the jump straight to 2k+, and when they try to scale their OS by 1.5x everything breaks.

OSX handles odd-scaling FLAWLESSLY and it doesn't even need to (ChadOS confirmed)

Linuxfags on suicide watch

Designers/typographers aren't stupid enough to work for free so Linux will always look like shit.

I've had a highdpi computer since 2012.

How can people be this poor?

So what is the difference between Linux & Mac rendering? I know Linux uses hinting which is lining fonts up to the grid of pixels. Mac doesn't do that and higher DPI screens are standard which makes it useless to do so?

This is my settings on a laptop with the same resolution. If you're going blind from that, you may want to consider getting glasses. The laptop is not my primary computer, so I'm currently looking at it from more than a meter away, and I have no trouble whatsoever reading it.

Most people would rather watch Big Bang Theory. Most people are basically idiots.

is that a 15.6" laptop? i'm coming from 12.5", now on 14".

It's 14".

This looks god awful.

Look at the lower-case 'a' in Japan at the top of the info box.

Moral of the thread: if you have eyes that work do yourself a big favour and get a Mac / install OSX.

Well I can read that on my screen, it's just not comfortable, and my periphery does go out pretty badly.

>install a bad os just to have webpages look good
I'd rather have bitmap fonts and a proper OS for actual work, thank you.