[HN Gopher] No more blurry fonts in Linux (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
No more blurry fonts in Linux (2023)
Author : Flex247A
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-09-25 04:05 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.aktsbot.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.aktsbot.in)
| mjevans wrote:
| On the one hand... OK great for consumption.
|
| On the other... Wouldn't this lead to terrible choices in font
| selection for anyone NOT using these settings?
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| The "on" image looks closer to how _I_ see fonts on macOS, so
| probably optimising that way has a bigger win. I don 't use the
| system often though.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Why can't I see the difference? Does this only work for older,
| standard resolution screens?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I could only see the difference when I viewed the images at
| 250x.
| Cort3z wrote:
| Click the picture to get a full resolution version. On my phone
| it's quite obvious. But to my eyes it just looks like someone
| made it bolder, not less blurry.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Off: https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-off.png
|
| On: https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-on.png
|
| Personally, I never had issues with fonts on any OS that much
| _except_ when I connected my M1 MacBook to a 1080p monitor,
| then it felt like the fonts had no anti-aliasing at all.
| pjerem wrote:
| MacOS have always had the best font rendering on HiDPI
| screens and also the worst on Low-DPI.
|
| Windows is historically very good on Low-DPI but they also
| managed to be great on HiDPI.
|
| Linux, well, it depends on so much things ... you can
| achieve good on both but you'd better be ok with integer
| scaling and not have multiple displays with different DPI.
| cehrlich wrote:
| Macs used to have good font rendering on Low-DPI displays
| (I would say the best, but I suppose that's a matter of
| opinion)
|
| Then Mojave switched to Metal and removed subpixel AA,
| and now it's the worst.
|
| Thread from when it happened:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873
| kelnos wrote:
| It's funny to read that thread (from 6 years ago, wow
| time flies) and see complaints that a lot of people have
| low-dpi external displays. But I think some of the
| rebuttal comments in that article rang true even then,
| and certainly do now: if you are spending money on an
| Apple laptop or workstation, Apple is going to expect you
| to spend money on hi-dpi external monitors.
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Yeah, the issue is that 6 years ago your only option for
| a highdpi monitor with the correct scale (e.g. for 27''
| it needs to be 5k, not 4k) would be the iMac or the XDR
| display that costs over $5k...
|
| Now that Apple sells their own (very decent) monitor at
| somewhat more affordable price it makes sense to use it
| as an external display, I agree.
| necovek wrote:
| I'll reiterate a comment I made elsewhere in this thread.
| With my vision corrected, 4k at 24" (~190ppi) needs
| subpixel rendering for crisp fonts. I would expect 5k at
| 27" or 6k at 32" (both around ~215ppi) would be the same,
| so my only option for comfortable external use with a Mac
| is really 8k at 32". I know that I am an outlier as I get
| my vision corrected with glasses/contacts to better than
| 20/20 (outside that 5%-95% group I guess), but I was
| perfectly well served by subpixel rendering (and continue
| to be).
|
| Luckily, Mac is only for work, and it is passable with
| 32" at 4k, but I can use Linux everywhere else for much
| nicer fonts. Unluckily, work is 8+h :)
| orangeboats wrote:
| You can have displays with different DPI on Linux _and_
| achieve good font rendering. But it requires the latest
| versions of your favourite DE (like GNOME 45+ and KDE
| 6.x) and you 'd need to give up X11 (which does not
| support mixed DPI very well).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| X11 handles mixed DPI fine. Monitor configuration GUI for
| DE don't support the required option however both X and
| nvidia-settings do
| lostmsu wrote:
| Does it have anything to do with DPI? I thought basically
| the state is Windows rules, MacOS and Linux suck on non-
| integer scaling ratios. For integer nobody has problems
| AFAIK.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| X has supported scaling forever. Integer scale up
| everything scale down the lower DPI monitor or monitors.
|
| xrandr --scale, xorg.conf, or nvidia-settings GUI and
| save to xorg config
| setopt wrote:
| That's because MacOS got rid of subpixel antialiasing
| sometime after launching Retina screens, which makes non-
| hiDPI screens have quite awful font rendering.
|
| I sometimes switch to a bitmap font like Fixedsys Excelsior
| or GNU Unifont when using MacOS with a low-resolution
| monitor to compensate (with antialiasing off so the bitmap
| font looks crisp).
|
| Also, JetBrains Mono somehow looks good on lowres screens
| even though it's not a bitmap font, it seems to not blur as
| much as other fonts when it gets antialiased.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| The "sometime" happened in macOS Big Sur. Prior to that
| in Mojave and Catalina, you could enable it back by
| twiddling a hidden preference with the word "legacy" in
| it. It somehow was worse than what you got in High Sierra
| and prior anyway.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| They don't sell anything without hiDPI for quite some
| time now (a decade?). Making their software look good on
| obsolete screens is understandably not a priority for
| them. And if you are happy to plug in something that old,
| you are kind of signaling that you don't really care
| about what things look like anyway. So, why bother to
| make that look good?
| gond wrote:
| > you don't really care about what things look like
| anyway.
|
| That statement has no connection to the premise.
|
| There are multiple reasons to use an old screen besides
| the mentioned reason of not caring for x.
| setopt wrote:
| There are plenty of non-hiDPI screens from other vendors
| on the market, especially "large" screens that are
| "medium" in price. In an office you're not always free to
| order a screen from any vendor you want (due to their
| framework agreements), unless of course you're paying for
| that hardware privately.
|
| I care about how things look, and have spent more time
| than I want to admit configuring MacOS apps to look good
| on the screens available to me. I just don't care enough
| to buy an expensive office screen with my own cash if my
| employer can't provide one.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I was talking about Apple. Apple stopped selling non
| hiDpi screens some time last decade. T
| ffsm8 wrote:
| So in a nutshell:
|
| Apple specifically wants that you cannot use non-apple
| displays by artificially worsening the experience for the
| user while strengthening the illusion that Apple's
| hardware looks better - even though the only reason it
| does is because Apple themselves made sure to make other
| displays look unnecessarily bad.
|
| It's hilarious there are people that actually think this
| is totally okay and not just plain anti-competitive with
| just enough plausible deniability to get away with it
| baq wrote:
| Reality distortion field is strong with this one.
|
| I have a perfectly good normie dpi 25x16 display which is
| extra crisp on windows. On macOS I had to install
| betterdisplay just to make it not miserably bad; it's
| just plain bad now. As far as I can tell Apple removed
| the feature because of greed and laziness.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > They don't sell anything without hiDPI for quite some
| time now (a decade?). Making their software look good on
| obsolete screens is understandably not a priority for
| them. And if you are happy to plug in something that old,
| you are kind of signaling that you don't really care
| about what things look like anyway.
|
| My apologies for buying 1080p monitors that had no issues
| with neither my Linux, nor my Windows computers, I guess.
| I can understand that they might not care about what I
| care about (supporting the hardware that I have, rather
| than going out of my way to buy a new monitor just
| because of a new computer deciding not to work with it
| well), I'd argue that maybe that's even fine because it's
| their device and ecosystem, but jeez, that tone is super
| uncalled for.
|
| As an aside, I use the M1 MacBook at a scaled resolution
| of 1440x900 because anything finer is hard for me to see.
| That's a visible PPI of around ~130 because of the 13.3
| inch screen. A 1080p monitor of 21.5 inch diagonal size
| would have a physical PPI of around ~100, so that's
| around 80% of the pixel density. That's not to say that
| the panel on the MacBook is not much nicer, but rather
| that with software anti-aliasing it could definitely be
| _okay_. Somehow I don 't want to buy a new monitor just
| for the weekends when I visit the countryside.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Subpixel antialiasing is going to be problematic anyway
| on newer displays that don't necessarily feature a plain
| RGBRGB (or similar) subpixel arrangement. For example,
| many OLED screens use RGBG/BGRG or even more complex
| "PenTile" subpixels.
| lostmsu wrote:
| For this Windows had ClearType tuner since before PenTile
| existed.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > Subpixel antialiasing is going to be problematic anyway
| on newer displays that don't necessarily feature a plain
| RGBRGB (or similar) subpixel arrangement.
|
| This will then mean making the subpixel anti-aliasing
| algorithm aware of different subpixel layouts. And this
| ought to be done anyway, because most anti-aliasing is
| usually at least _somewhat_ hardware-aware. In my
| opinion, regardless of how subpixels are laid out, more
| resolution is always better.
| necovek wrote:
| There was a quick option to change subpixel layout way-
| back-when in Linux (GNOME 2.x series), eg. a quick search
| gave me a screenshot at this page:
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/88528/how-to-switch-on-
| sub-p...
|
| Today it seems it's hidden as a dconf option:
| $ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/interface/font-
| antialiasing 'rgba'
|
| But this is an issue that applies to VA panels as well
| (cheaper than IPS, worse viewing angles, but better
| contrast ratio), and I have a 27" 4k VA screen that works
| just fine with it turned on in Linux -- text is so much
| clearer with it on than off, and attaching a MacBook to a
| 4k screen at 27" or 32" IPS makes me hate MacOS for
| killing subpixel rendering off.
|
| As for "retina" resolutions, I've tried 24" at 4K as soon
| as it came out (with that Dell monitor that required 2 DP
| 1.1 connections for 60Hz IIRC), and turning subpixel
| rendering off made text and lines jagged -- that was ~190
| ppi at a normal viewing distance with vision corrected to
| better than 20/20 (which is what I usually have -- can't
| really work without glasses anyway, and worse correction
| leaves me with headaches). For the record, 5k at 27" and
| 6k at 32" is roughly ~216 ppi, so not much better than
| ~190 ppi: subpixel rendering probably achieves 2x the
| increase in text clarity for those not sensitive to
| colour fringing (I am not).
|
| So, subpixel rendering is really not an issue on any
| displays, but Apple will happily tell you what's the
| limit of your vision and upsell you on their monitors.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Subpixel antialiasing is kind of overrated anyway. On
| screens that are low enough DPI to benefit from it, it
| can cause color fringing (especially for people with
| astigmatism) that is worse than the blur from grayscale
| antialiasing.
| setopt wrote:
| On medium-DPI screens, I find that subpixel antialiasing
| make fonts significantly less blurry than grayscale
| antialiasing without causing obvious color fringing. On
| actual low-DPI screens, bitmap fonts are IMO the only
| really usable option. (YMMV, but I have mild astigmatism
| and use glasses.)
| necovek wrote:
| I disagree: I am not susceptible to colour fringing, and
| I can tell if subpixel rendering is on or off on 24" 4k
| screens (~190 ppi) at a regular or even further viewing
| distance (~70cm/27") -- I specifically got that display
| hoping for subpixel rendering to be turned off.
|
| Haven't tried Apple's big "retina" screens but
| considering they are ~215 ppi, pretty confident 10%
| increase in PPI wouldn't make a difference that subpixel
| rendering does. Laptop screens have higher resolution,
| but haven't really paid attention to whether M1 Air 13"
| or 4K 14" X1 Carbon work for me without subpixel
| rendering (I prefer to be docked).
|
| Before anyone jumps on "you've got incredible vision": I
| wear either glasses or contacts, and with that my vision
| corrects to better than 20/20 -- slightly lower
| correction induces headaches for me. Without glasses, I'd
| probably be happy with 640x480 on 32" so they are kind of
| a must. :)
| rubslopes wrote:
| BetterDisplay HiDPI feature (available on the free version)
| much improves font rendering on external displays:
| https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
|
| This helped me a lot, I was about to ditch my external
| monitor because of blurriness.
| hedora wrote:
| Yeah; something seems wrong with their setup.
|
| I've seen Linux render fonts like that, but not recently. I'd
| probably look into debugging my setup if that's what my
| desktop looked like.
| konart wrote:
| Look at the 'e' for example. Night and day difference.
|
| PS: talking about screenshots in the article.
| Flex247A wrote:
| Can someone comment on the effect lcdfilter has?
|
| Seems like full hinting + RGB antialiasing is the way to go on
| non 4K displays.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Second screenshot looks blurrier to me than the first. Both are
| bad. It's not a Mac.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| Mac font rendering on non retina displays is pretty awful. Mac
| 'cheats' somewhat with hDPI screens + aggressive super sampling
| as MacOS doesn't do fractional scaling and instead rounds up to
| the nearest integer multiple. At my current display scaling
| settings my MBP is using a 5120x2880 buffer for my 4k
| (3840x2160) as it's set to scale to a logical size of
| 2560x1440.
|
| Under a fair comparison on a 1080p display with no scaling even
| Windows demolishes MacOS these days. Apple dropped support for
| subpixel AA years ago which really hurts on standard DPI
| rendering.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| This idea of scaling graphics up and down instead of
| rendering at the display native resolution with size
| measurements in dpi-independent units was so bad. I
| understood it to be a neat trick, when the first retina
| displays were relased. But everything afterwards is just
| awfull.
| nasretdinov wrote:
| With fractional scaling you can get objects misaligned
| otherwise, and I personally found it very annoying e.g. in
| VSCode with 1.25x zoom, where the objects would move
| slightly when you interact with them, due to imperfect and
| inconsistent size calculations.
|
| IMO the way Apple does this is quite brute force and
| unconventional, but at least the picture doesn't drift with
| different scale.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| Fractional scaling is not the alternative.
| Lorkki wrote:
| Apple have always preferred preserving letter forms over
| hinting, so Macs are therefore also "blurry" on lower DPI
| displays. The reason they aren't these days is because the DPI
| is higher.
|
| Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to
| Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font
| shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.
|
| There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel
| rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by
| default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions
| had already enabled those features anyway.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| With any reasonable resolution screen (1080p or more), you
| can have both good preservation of letter forms and a non-
| blurry image, simply by applying a sharpening filter after
| antialiasing. Some image downsampling methods, such as
| Lanczos filtering, effectively do this for you. The tradeoff
| is one can detect some very fine 'ringing' artifacts around
| the sharpened transitions, but these don't impact readability
| in any way.
| ahoka wrote:
| Mac font rendering is the worst out there.
|
| For example: https://i.redd.it/f61p6sa34cta1.png
|
| Or: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/screen-
| shot-2022-10...
| omnimus wrote:
| When i look at the first picture the Mac is blurrier but at
| same time the Windows doesnt keep the balance of the font.
| Look at all the horizontal vs verzical strokes in ZLF they
| are for sure drawn to be same optically thickness but on
| windows they are very wrong.
|
| I dont think windows is such clear winner here. Seems like
| different philosophies.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Just hold the phone at some distance, you will see how bad
| MacOS'es one is in reality.
| Apreche wrote:
| It's an improvement, but it's still absolute garbage. Just throw
| in the towel already. Copy whatever MacOS does and have it be the
| default.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| the macos approach is to only ship weird and nonstandard
| monitor resolutions to convince people to buy your fancy
| display that costs 5x as much
| p1necone wrote:
| Isn't "what MacOS does" just shipping extremely high DPI
| screens on everything + using regular anti-aliasing on fonts
| with no hinting or subpixel rendering?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| That sounds exactly like what I do in Linux.
| konart wrote:
| I have Fedora Kinoite and Mbpr M1Pro connected to the same 4k
| Dell monitor. Font rendering is still much better on macos
| than any settings in Fedora.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| Probably because MacOS doesn't do fractional scaling. If
| you're not using a scaling mode that's an integer multiple
| of your monitor resolution MacOS oversamples the whole
| display. Kinonite is KDE iirc which can do fractional
| scaling (quite well too) on KDE 6. So if you're comparing
| 1.5x scaling on KDE compared to MacOS you're actually
| comparing a 3840x2160 render to 5120x2880.
| konart wrote:
| MacOS was doing fractional scaling long before KDE even
| began to implement it.
|
| UPD: just to be clear - even on macbook's screen macOS
| uses scaled resolution by default.
| p1necone wrote:
| MacOS _always_ renders at an integer multiple of their
| internal "logical" resolution, and then just shrinks the
| framebuffer down at the end to whatever the native
| resolution of the target monitor is.
|
| Fractional scaling is rendering directly to a framebuffer
| at the target monitors native resolution, and scaling
| your UI _fractionally_ to look right on the target screen
| size.
|
| Apples approach is more resource intensive, but probably
| makes UI layout implementation a lot simpler and more
| consistent + potentially looks better than rendering at
| "real" native res for a lot of content.
| silon42 wrote:
| Why would anyone do fractional scaling... why not just
| natively render at the proper resolution. (barring old
| broken apps).
| MindSpunk wrote:
| Given a 4K monitor you have 3 options: - No scaling,
| produces tiny text and UI elements - 2x scaling, use a
| logically 1080p display leading to very large text and UI
| elements - 1.5x scaling, logically a 1440p display
|
| 4k at 1x produces UI that's too small, 2x scaling is too
| large for a 27 inch monitor. 1.5x sizes everything like a
| 1440p display but you still get the higher resolution
| rendering at 4k.
|
| Fractional scaling _is_ rendering at the 'proper'
| resolution of the display. It can be challenging to
| workaround some issues like how to deal with window sizes
| that scale to a fractional native buffer (i.e. a 501
| logical pixel wide image becomes 751.5 physical pixels?).
| Apple decides 'no' to native fractional scaling, so does
| GNOME unless that's changed recently.
| p1necone wrote:
| > so does GNOME unless that's changed recently.
|
| Which imo was a bad choice. It works pretty well on MacOS
| because Apple only ships machines with a fairly
| constrained, known set of resolution/physical dimension
| combos. And they sell their own monitors for stuff like
| the mac mini where that isn't the case. This means they
| can design all their UI elements to be the "right" size
| without needing fractional scaling for a very large
| percentage of their users.
|
| Gnome is running on all sorts of screens, with all sorts
| of resolution/dimension combos and on a lot of them you
| have to choose between "way too big" and "way too small".
| kaba0 wrote:
| I believe GNOME just hides the option for fractional
| values in their native settings menu, but it can be
| easily accessed through something like GNOME tweaks and
| similar.
| konart wrote:
| Wokring on a 4+k monitor without scaling is difficult (at
| least if we are talking about text)
| necovek wrote:
| Gnome has another set of hidden settings to set default
| system font sizes: for UI elements and "document" font.
| Some non-GNOME apps used to respect that too (like
| Firefox and LibreOffice), but others were not-scaled.
|
| Still, if you mostly relied on Gtk+ apps, where Gtk+
| widgets scale to fit the text they are showing, this
| produced pretty good results even if some spacing was a
| bit inconsistent (i.e. spacing was too small compared to
| widget and text sizes).
|
| Unfortunately, this approach seems to work less and less
| well as Gnome devs are following Apple's lead.
| necovek wrote:
| It's exactly for "old broken apps".
|
| What I generally do on my Gnome systems running 4k
| screens is to use 125% or 150% scaling, and then set
| larger default fonts for the system. Fractional scaling
| helps keep old apps legible even if imperfect, but
| updated apps which respect system font size render great
| (Gtk+ widgets auto-scale to fit the text).
|
| Unfortunately, this approach ain't gonna work with
| Wayland as well.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| KDE got fractional _rendering_ of fonts and UI back in
| Plasma 4.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| I think you're right, I might've been confusing it with
| proper support for mixed DPI desktops (i.e. one display
| at 1.5, and another at 1x). I think Plasma 5 could do it
| but I had a lot of problems until Plasma 6.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Fractional scaling was introduced in late 5 update and
| wasn't touched in 6 at all, per-monitor setting is only
| in Wayland for an obvious reason.
| mmcnl wrote:
| KDE works the same.
| pjerem wrote:
| It's probably what macOS does but they manage to do it
| cleanly whatever the display scaling you choose, including
| arbitrary values of scaling that are unsupported by the OS
| (but that you can force with some software).
|
| On Linux, good luck using anything else than integer scaling.
| And it's a shame because with a 4K screen and fractional
| scaling, you can get both more definition AND more real
| estate.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Yeah, no. Mac font rendering is blurry, Windows font rendering
| is pixelated or okay with the right ClearType settings,
| FreeType with slight hinting and subpixel rendering (lcdfilter)
| is between these two and really fine IMO.
| abhinavk wrote:
| macOS uses grayscale anti-aliasing exclusively. But what it
| makes it work that well is the HiDPI (200+ dpi) displays Apple
| ships.
|
| Use a 32-inch 4K display and it will have be blurry/thick fonts
| too.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I might be blind but I'm using 2x4K 32" displays on macOS and
| the fonts still look like paper to me. It was funny because
| every Apple commentator I had listened to made it seem like
| my retinas would melt out of sheer disgust if I didn't use a
| 5K display.
|
| It looks night and day better than my 2x4K 27" I use with my
| Windows 11 work laptop, even with ClearType (That was a let
| down. I replaced 2x1080p 21" displays and expected that to
| fix the woeful fonts on Windows).
| onli wrote:
| Absolutely. On my external display macos fonts looked
| horrible, way worse than on Linux.
| phito wrote:
| Am I the only one who absolutely doesn't care about this? Both
| are just fine to me.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Font rendering is absolute garbage on macOS since they removed
| subpixel-antialiasing. Everything is a blurry mess unless you
| have a high-dpi display (and even then it's pointlessly worse).
| eviks wrote:
| How is it worse with a high dpi display?
| lostmsu wrote:
| HiDPI is not magic. If you look closer, you will see
| artifacts which you won't see on OSes that care.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Mac looks shit. Always has done. Turns out you can get used to
| anything. My standard is paper. The only way to get close to
| that is high DPI screens. Guess what Macs come with now? My
| Linux PC also has a high DPI display. Only difference is you
| have the choice to spend less and still get decent looking
| fonts if you don't use Mac.
| Apreche wrote:
| In the replies people are talking about current issues
| regarding scaling and high dpi displays.
|
| That has little to do with it. Apple has had vastly superior
| font rendering since the day OSX launched, and have been in
| first place ever since. There's no point in my memory of the
| past 20+ years this was not the case regardless of display
| technology.
|
| Even though other systems implement a lot of the same
| techniques of sup-pixel rendering, fractional scaling, etc. the
| results speak for themselves. With the same monitors, the same
| display cables, the same fonts, and the same applications, text
| rendered by Apple operating systems is more crisp, clean,
| readable, and pleasing to the eye. Configuring settings on
| Linux improves the situation, but no configuration gets close
| to the quality Apple delivers by default. Apple is also
| superior to Windows in this regard, but the margin is much
| smaller.
|
| This is coming from a person who maintains a long list of MacOS
| gripes because of all the things they do wrong. Font rendering
| is one of the few things they have consistently done better
| than everyone else.
| anothername12 wrote:
| If I have a 4K display, do I still need to worry about font
| rendering settings?
| Flex247A wrote:
| Quite likely no, as even grayscale antialiasing is going to
| look amazing in 4K.
|
| macOS has grayscale antialiasing on by default.
| vardump wrote:
| If it's small like 15", probably not. If it's 32" or more,
| probably yes.
| konart wrote:
| What kind of sadist sets `font-size: 10.5pt;`?
|
| Sorry about that rant.
| matejn wrote:
| I wish I could set my Visual Studio coding font to 10.5pt. Now
| I have to use 10pt and 105% zoom!
|
| But then again, VS doesn't allow font size in px ...
| konart wrote:
| 10(.5) looks tiny though. I can place 6 copies of the article
| on my monitor, lol.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, as usual, given the desktop fragmentation.
| makz wrote:
| I kind of prefer the fonts in the first screenshot
| muppetman wrote:
| Same I wonder if they're mixed up
| qwertox wrote:
| I agree. The second one looks like it has `font-weight`
| increased, making it all somewhat bolder, reducing the distance
| to the bold font.
| larschdk wrote:
| Both use subpixel rendering is that it is specific to the
| display where it is shown. You need the same subpixel ordering
| and you can't really scale it. Your preference may be correct
| on your display, while mine is correct here: I strongly prefer
| the second image.
|
| The first image has less hinting, causing the top of the
| x-height to be rendered at a half pixel. This makes it seem
| less intense that the rest of the letters. The second image
| aligns way better and have a more consistent intensity and
| sharp edges, but gives an overall slightly more bold
| appearance, and also compromises a tiny bit on the actual shape
| of letters.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| This, I like the blurry fonts. They should fix kerning bugs for
| certain popular fonts instead.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Both are garbage if you are on a low DPI display
| dartharva wrote:
| Font rendering on linux tends to be garbage even if you have a
| high DPI display
| hollerith wrote:
| I used to prefer font rendering on Gnome to that of MacOS and
| Windows, but as of Gnome 46, they changed it so that if you
| set a fractional scale factor, everything gets blurry (a
| different kind of blurry than the OP means) just like it does
| on MacOS, making Windows font rendering the desktop font
| rendering I like the best as long as I stick to relatively
| modern apps like browsers, VSCode and the newer apps that
| comes with Windows like Settings. (Legacy apps on Windows are
| super super blurry at fractional scale factors.)
|
| I use non-HiDPI 1920-pixel-wide displays at scale factors
| between 1.25 and 2.0. (Yes, I like big type and big UI
| elements: my eyesight is bad.)
| omnimus wrote:
| Sounds like you might have something to do with Wayland?
| mmcnl wrote:
| No, Linux (Gnome/Wayland) uses a method similar to macOS
| where everything is rendered at a higher resolution and
| then scaled down. If you have a very high DPI display it
| looks nice, but if the DPI is not that high to begin with
| you will notice that the result is a bit blurry. Only
| Windows has truly good scaling.
| hollerith wrote:
| I agree. The blurriness at fractional scaling factors on
| Mac and in very recent versions of Gnome is _obvious_ on
| a non-HiDPI display (at least a 24-inch one like the ones
| I use).
|
| Until a year ago, Gnome/Wayland did it the way Windows
| does it! I.e. the method the OS used to make the text and
| the other UI elements the size the user specified
| refrained from applying any blurriness-causing
| resolution-scaling algorithm as long as you avoided the
| XWayland compatibility layer (and the compatibility layer
| that lets modern Windows support legacy apps makes the
| legacy app blurry, too).
|
| Chrome's "zoom" feature (activated by the keyboard
| shortcuts Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus for example) does
| fractional scaling (i.e., allows the user to adjust the
| size of the text and the other UI elements) without
| introducing any blurriness. Installing Chrome and
| experimenting with that feature is probably the easiest
| way for the average reader to see what we are talking
| about.
|
| One parenthetical detail is that (unlike on Mac or
| Windows) in order to get fractional scaling at all on
| Gnome/Wayland you have had to use a command line to add a
| particular key to a list named 'experimental-features',
| but that will change next month when Gnome version 47
| will be released, at which time the user will be able to
| change the scaling factor in the Settings app just like
| one can on Mac or Windows without first having to
| configure anything or opt in to anything.
|
| I would love to know the reasoning behind the Gnome
| team's decision here because just because although you or
| I might not be able to _notice_ the blurriness on a HiDPI
| display or to say with confidence that the blurriness is
| there doesn 't mean that the image is as sharp as it
| could be: the scaling algorithm used on Mac and on Gnome
| versions 46 and 47 is clearly throwing some "visual
| information" away regardless of the resolution of the
| display.
| omnimus wrote:
| I have both side by side and i think this is more of a myth.
| They simply render the same on hidipi except very small sizes
| where the engines differ.
|
| On Linux font selection is terrible, people have problems
| with Wayland/x11 rendering and other settings (often
| opinionated defaults from distros). But when you are lucky
| :)) you can get pretty much same hidpi font rendering.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Freetype at least has knobs that are both configurable and
| understandable. On Windows, you only have Cleartype Tuner,
| and it can be hard to get what you want.
| mmcnl wrote:
| At least Windows and Linux try to render something usable.
| macOS simply removes all font aliasing and expects you to use
| a high DPI display.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I cant see the difference?
| peter_retief wrote:
| I just opened a file in VIM and it does look denser/clearer.
| Cool.
| zhenyi wrote:
| Video showing the before/after: https://streamable.com/904w6l
| planb wrote:
| They are both blurry. One is just a bit bolder. Nothing beats
| HiDPI displays for crisp font displaying imho.
| necovek wrote:
| HiDPI displays combined with subpixel renderings for the
| total win. Unfortunately, that's dead for MacOS today, and
| for a time, unachievable with Wayland on Linux.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _No more blurry fonts in Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39640329 - March 2024 (2
| comments)
|
| _No more blurry fonts in Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853588 - Jan 2024 (1
| comment)
| 7e wrote:
| Linux fonts have never been beautiful, and probably never will
| be. The talent is just not there. Give me a high DPI Mac any day.
| Now that is beauty.
| omnimus wrote:
| I am not sure if you are talking about fonts included with the
| OS or about rendering. But on high DPI screen all OS render
| fonts well (and pretty much the same). Its how the OS renders
| the small type on low DPI screens where lots of guessing from
| rendering engine has to happen.
|
| About the font choices for sure Mac has better selection than
| open source typefaces... but you know you can take your San
| Francisco and install it on Linux if you want.
| mmcnl wrote:
| macOS doesn't do anything with fonts. They removed all aliasing
| features. The Apple solution is to use retina displays for
| everything. That works great with Linux too.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Both look shit.
| bad_username wrote:
| Am I the last person on the Earth to turn off font smoothing
| completely and use fonts perfectly hinted to the pixel grid?
| Can't get any sharper than that, and really helps with eye
| strain.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Nope[1].
|
| [1] https://datagubbe.se/fontfest/
| nielssp wrote:
| No, at least that's what I'm going for as well, at least for
| monospace fonts in editors and such. I can't stand the slightly
| blurry look of antialiased fonts and absolutely prefer the
| crisp edges of traditional bitmap fonts.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Do you have a working config for this on Linux?
| bad_username wrote:
| This is a regular control panel setting in Linux Mint
| (Cinnamon). Not sure about other distros.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Try this: $ cat
| $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf <match
| target="font"> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
| <const>none</const> </edit> <test
| qual="any" name="size" compare="more">
| <double>1</double> </test> <test
| qual="any" name="size" compare="less">
| <double>22</double> </test> <edit
| name="antialias" mode="assign">
| <bool>false</bool> </edit> <edit
| name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
| <const>hintfull</const> </edit> </match>
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I do this only for specific fonts at specific sizes.
| zokier wrote:
| The problem with all these font rendering discussions is that we
| are missing some ultra-high quality (offline) reference rendering
| system to compare against. Not only does that make these
| discussions pretty unproductive (just subjective back and forth),
| but also practically that drives font designers to build fonts
| that look good on their preferred platform(s), rather than
| something that is built to look good on spec. This drives then
| feedback loop where other platforms then need to start emulating
| the major popular platforms with their flaws instead of aiming
| for the highest quality; for example this stem-darkening is
| almost certainly just inspired by macos but doesn't really have
| justification outside that.
| winternewt wrote:
| On a related note, I thought that by 2024 we would have
| displays with 250+ dpi resolution, but to my disappointment I'm
| still waiting for this to be a reality on anything but small
| laptop screens. A lot of the rendering tricks that corrupt the
| appearance of fonts have to do with how few pixels are
| available for rasterisation. We should have been getting print-
| quality text by now.
| craftkiller wrote:
| Ahem... https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/viewsonic-
| vg3281-with-31-5-ips...
|
| Personally I'm holding out for UHBR20
|
| Edit: Also there's this one from 2017
| https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-
| ultrasharp-32-8k-monito...
| winternewt wrote:
| Right, I have seen the Dell screen before. But it is
| currently an extremely niche product which means it is
| wildly outside my price range. And the VG3281 is still not
| available in my country even though it was released in
| 2023.
| bartvk wrote:
| Is that ViewSonic monster actually for sale?
| gjvc wrote:
| This works very well on my 4k screen.
|
| Every discussion of font rendering technology must include a
| statement to the effect of "Acorn RISC OS fonts from 1990 have
| not been bettered". :-)
| bamboozled wrote:
| The screenshots look the same to me?
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