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Comment by von_lohengramm | Hacker News Reader

The font rendering on that example of "the perfect button" is rather atrocious. It's kind of sad that Windows is (was?) the last bastion of serviceable font rendering.

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Interesting, I always disliked Windows font rendering and much prefer the was MacOS renders fonts. I couldn’t explain why, but I know many graphic designers who say the same. I guess it’s a matter of taste!

Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse than anything else.

For some value of “normal”. 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks.

After a decade of “retina” screens, I’m ruined, I can’t stand the look of anti-aliased fonts, whether Windows, Linux or macOS.

> 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks.

This is the hardware solution to something that can be solved in software. If your game is laggy, of course upgrading to a 3090 is going to help, but that doesn't mean you're solving the problem.

It can't be solved in software, due to the Nyquist limit: Sharp high-contrast edges (text) necessarily have high frequencies, and you need a high sampling rate (pixel density) to produce a good approximation of that signal. People have spent a lot of effort to push anti-aliasing techniques as far as they can go, but displays with higher pixel density are just better for displaying text.

I agree that if you are making something and your target audience will be using non-HiDPI displays, then you should actually design your thing on those displays too. But no matter how good your software is, pixel density places a limit on what you can achieve.

Pixel-perfect rendering (i.e. hinting) is needed in order to reach the Nyquist limit. By forgoing it, you're limiting yourself to an effective resolution that's only 0.7× or so the physical one,

Bitmap fonts (and hinted fonts are automatically generated bitmap fonts) are pixel art, so the Nyquist limit doesn't apply. In pixel art, the pixels are treated as little squares or rectangles, not band-limited point samples. This means you sacrifice the ability to display arbitrary shapes, but I'm not trying to reproduce printed text so I don't care.

I have perfectly sharp text on a 1080p monitor because I disable antialiasing in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and force full hinting.

Nitpicking, but a pixel is always a point sample, not a little square. The native medium for displaying pixel art is CRT displays, where these point samples are used to control an electron gun that introduces a Gaussian blur, basically the best case for purely analog upsampling (or DAC, rather) of a pixel raster. No little squares in sight, though! What you're talking about is using pixel-perfect control to reach the Nyquist limit, as mentioned in my sibling comment.

Pixel art is defined by treating pixels as little squares. There is no single native medium for displaying pixel art. The same techniques were used for games on portable systems with LCD displays. Additionally, there are many examples of printed art using blocky pixels.

The Nyquist limit is irrelevant to pixel art, because the Nyquist limit applies only to reconstructing signals from point samples. Using pixel art on a monochrome LCD (no subpixels), I can display signals with maximum frequency limited only by the sharpness of the edges of the little squares.

This.

The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) displays is painful.

Over 2/3 of regular users are still using 1080p[1]. If your design looks bad on FHD then it looks bad to most people.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Right, but it looks good on the designer's screen. That's the issue.

Just like programmers should have to run their apps on 10 year old computers and feel the pain, so should designers have to try their work on 10 year old monitors.

>Over 2/3 of regular users

That isn't going to be the case for Apple users though is it. Apple don't have any non retina devices in their lineup now. The only Apple users who will see a low dpi display are those plugging in a low dpi external monitor. They are going to be a minority.

Perhaps a better survey would be the one by Firefox[0] since it isn't biased towards gamers. Basically HiDPI monitors are like a combined 2% of all Firefox users.

1080p usage is lower than on Steam but that is because 768p usage is higher :-P.

[0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

I guess that is the reason why every musician should copy their master to a cassette tape and go to a shitty car with a tape-player and listen there, why every developer should have a very old crap-computer to run their software on and why every UX designer should have a crappy screen to view their design on. :-)

This has been debated for decades. Joel Spolsky has a blog post about it from 2007.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...

If you think that looks bad, wait until you see what GTK4 was stuck looking like for the first 10 months of it's life cycle: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

I agree that the defaults are atrocious, but freetype can be configured and the options are limitless.

Linux font rendering has come a long way in the last couple years. With TrueType2 and Windows fonts taken from an installer ISO (and not the ancient corefonts package), you can actually get some overall mostly okay font rendering. Every now and again, the hinting bugs out and it looks unreadable, but its far better than the olden days.

What exactly has happened in the last couple of years? And how would installing those newer Microsoft fonts affect font rendering elsewhere than where they are used (not at all by the desktop environment by default, and as to web sites, it depends on what you use)?

IIRC the last big-ish change for me was around 15 years ago when some patent-encumbered patches were enabled by default by (some) Linux distributions. Which is okay for me because overall I think freetype font rendering is better than that in Windows with most fonts, the arguable exception being certain Microsoft fonts – however, freetype has the additional advantage that it rarely if ever produces pixelated ugliness with unhinted webfonts, unlike what I've seen happening with Windows.

> What exactly has happened in the last couple of years?

Some subpixel rendering techniques became unencumbered quite recently. So newer versions of freetype should have nicer subpixel rendering enabled by default.

Maybe there's some configuration magic you can do, but I don't think I've ever seen decent font rendering on a Linux distro out of the box.

It's one of the biggest reasons I've never switched to desktop Linux, and I'm not even one of those super picky people who talk about the intricacies of typefaces all day.

Ubuntu's font rendering is really good in its stock configuration.

But I understand libre licensed typefaces it ships with might not be to everyones liking.

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