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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the screenshots, I really still like the look of the windows and icons, but the system font is really holding it back. I didn't realize how bad it looked compared to modern system fonts. I get the feeling a font switch would really improve the look.

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Uh, the font is modern, it's "Noto Sans" from Google's new "Noto" family of fonts: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Previously the default font was DejaVu Sans, which really looked a lot worse.

Well, it doesn't look very good in any of the screenshots.

Perhaps because there's no subpixel hinting, I guess?

Haiku does have it (it was hard-disabled for a long time due to patent concerns), but there's a bug relating to how the main text control draws strings that causes characters to overlap one another with it enabled, and so things generally look worse when it is. Someone should take the time to fix that...

The screenshots are scaled a bit. They look better full-size: https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-in...

Hm, character spacing is pretty much broken in this screenshot. Not sure what is going on there, but it is certainly not completely correct.

That's a screenshot of BeOS, so the font rendering engine behind that is from 1998. Not very surprising, then :)

Well, it looks the same in https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/

Those screenshots are DejaVu Sans, not Noto Sans, and with a different font rendering engine than the ones in this article. We should probably update those, though.

Ok, is there a screenshot from the current Haiku build?

Yes, the ones in this article, e.g. https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/75-packages.pn...

D'oh, I had a haiku screenshot selected at first, but then I picked that one because it had more stuff on it. Didn't notice it was a BeOS one.

Half of them are BeOS screenshots, which doesn't seem to have subpixel or anti-alias..

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