Text Rendering: Why Computer Displays Suck for Reading | Hacker News Reader

Text Rendering: Why Computer Displays Suck for Reading

daringfireball.net

14 pointsgarret8 comments

The problem is simply one of resolution.

Blah blah. Brace a book or magazine in the same position as a computer monitor and you will have the same unpleasant experience while reading it. Monitors are bad because of positioning, immobility, and (even if those were solved) rigidity/unresponsiveness to manipulation by the fingers.

I am not sure resolution is the only reason. LCDs emit their own light, paper just reflects light and is much gentler for the eyes because of this.

That has always sounded like anecdotal evidence to me. Reading on a monitor should in that case be like reading paper in very good light, although with lower resolution. What is the qualitative difference between emitted light and reflected light?

I suppose reflected light matches better with the ambient, while with emitted light this is difficult to get. Matchng both, brightness and color.

Also, I don't like to read on white background (neither screen or paper), and on the computer nowadays the more usual background is white... I like yellowish backgrounds.

I agree that computer displays suck for reading. But there is one important, very simple lesson to be learned from this about computer typography: while in print, serif fonts are always easier to read for long stretches of text and sans-serif should be used only for display (headings and the like), on computer screens it really helps to have very simple fonts with the minimum possible amount of embellishment. Some sort of Helvetica derivative is always easier to read, especially in small sizes, and even with the fanciest subpixel rendering, than a complex thick-and-thin serifed font designed with high-quality print in mind.

BTW, I haven't seen a Kindle yet. Somebody I know has one, but he doesn't live in the area and I'm unlikely to meet him for quite a while. Are they any more pleasant to read from than a computer screen?

This one never gets old.

It's amazing how little people know about subpixel rendering, even in the design profession. I suppose it's not really required knowledge, but it's interesting to know how text antialiasing really works. You can do a lot with LCDs.

You got it wrong: LCDs, due to their incredible sharpness, created a need for antialiased fonts. Predating CRTs with their universal slight blurriness didn't need it, it was kind of "built into the hardware".

Huh? You can't do subpixel rendering on a CRT, so it would have been impossible to implement before LCDs.

Normal antialiasing has existed since long before LCDs.

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