Hacker News Reader

Comment by Longhanks | Hacker News Reader

What? As someone who hates Windows' Font rendering, why would you want this?

The OS X font rendering is awesome, on Linux, Infinality can be tweaked to look even better, but windows? It's hideous, inconsistent and terrible to change...

View on HN

I don't want to defend Windows' font rendering, because I hate it too, but (as far as I understand) the core idea behind these changes is good. AGG's article on text rasterization[1] also recommends that renderers ignore horizontal hinting and it has some demo images that look quite good. Also, a lot of fonts are designed for Windows' style of hinting.

[1]: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...

I agree with that assessment (although I think OS X font render has problems as well). I'm a bit worried because now Infinality is removed from the code base by default, so I suspect I'm going to have to stick to customer builds to get the font rendering that I prefer.

I suffer from ocular migraines and as hard as it is to believe (even for me), the way fonts are rendered makes a difference. I will literally go blind looking at badly rendered fonts. I'm going to take a wait and see attitude, though. Not all fonts will be affected, so perhaps it will be OK.

Have you tried a retina display? I find that the higher DPI panel reduces my eye strain.

I use a 4K 28" monitor, and a retina 15" MBP, and I still get ocular migraines personally :(

Thankfully I just get the "blindness" and not the headaches at least.

Yeah. I have the most bizarre setup up. I have a 13.3" display (with about 165 DPI), so not retinal, but still relatively high resolution. Anything bigger than this seems to trigger my migraines. I'm really waiting for the day when I can get 30 fps on an e-ink display. Something about staring into the light seems to be a problem. But low contrast is also a huge problem. So I usually have my backlight set at around 10% (!!) and my colour themes are set so that you would think that I subscribe to the clown school of programming. Everything is done in a 16 colour console with a 25 point font. You have no idea how many hours I've spent comparing the contrast ratios of various 16 colour schemes. All I can say is that it's a good thing that I come from a time where 80x25 column terminals were state of the art ;-)

I'm considering moving to very large wall mounted TV and sitting far enough away so that the display angle of the screen is about the same as my 13.3" laptop. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to wall mount a TV in my current apartment, so it may have to wait until I buy a house (I bet the e-ink display comes first ;-) )

Bad font rendering gives me an instant headache as well, especially blurry rendering. From the zoomed-in sample pictures, it looks like this new renderer does less snapping of character stems to pixels, which sounds like the problem that has caused blurry rendering in the past. (I'm also concerned about the extensive mentions of specific hinted fonts; hopefully this doesn't break rendering with fonts like DejaVu, for instance.) However, I'm going to wait and see what this new version looks like, hopefully when it shows up in Debian experimental.

This preference is subjective. There are valid reasons to prefer OS X rendering (scaling is proportional), but there are also valid reasons to prefer Windows rendering (stems are less blurry).

Totally agree. I have to work on Windows, and if I could get it to render fonts the same as FreeType (freetype-freeworld-2.4.1 on Fedora 23, light hinting, subpixel smoothing), I would be a happy camper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com