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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

Do all ImGui apps have text rendering this bad? I'm having trouble smoothly reading... any of the text, at least on Mac. It has a settings box, which allows you to change font size (but appears to do nothing), and a scaling option which ... just seems to make the artifacts bigger.

Switching to dark mode (by default it matched the system) made it slightly better just by virtue of having more contrast (and all the setting boxes actually have different coloured backgrounds that means you can tell where one ends and the other begins).

It would be nice to find a good replacement for 010.

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By default it uses a pixel-perfect font (the one that's included in ImGui) so anti-aliasing will not do anything but make text look blurry.

If you don't like the default font, it's super easy to change it though. Just go into the settings and under Font select your .ttf Font file

What do you mean by a pixel-perfect font? A bitmap font? Seems a very odd choice for the current era of high resolution screens.

The default ImGui rasterizer (imstb_truetype) is rubbish. The new rasterizer (imgui_freetype) should be used instead.

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/tree/master/misc/freetype

I wouldn't call it "new", it's been around as an optional component for years, and yeah it's a huge improvement.

I get why they might want ImGui to be a self-contained thing without a FreeType dependency, but FreeType should probably still be the default.

I was going to ask this. As someone with fine-detail vision issues, I found the font rendering uncomfortable.

Also, you can exit the app without any warning to save your work. I submitted this as a feature request.

I think there’s something off with the render scaling, because the pixels are enormous even when I set it to a non-fixed sized font (Monaco). I had to set 2x scaling and then it looked better but only because the text was enormous.

I recall this being something you had to pay attention to with imgui/glfw — probably just needs a small tweak.

Yeah, and ironically it says "[for] people who value their retinas"..

I think there's just no single good answer for this. Up to 2560x1440 on a 27" screen I much prefer bitmap fonts. Above, for e.g. 3840x2160+ at the same physical size I think vector is better.

I used to prefer bitmap fonts too during the transition period. But after using vector fonts for years, it's hard to look at them now. I don't even use particularly high dpi screens.

Either way, I think for default the dev should just go with the norm (i.e. what is popular for the majority). Users can always change to bitmap fonts if they want.

They claim [1] the text rendering is "pixel-perfect" now in the default font. But anti-aliasing is on by default for custom-chosen fonts, maybe one of those will work better?

[1] https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/issues/431

Do you have the same issue with the screenshots?

The screenshots are so jarring to read. Zero anti-aliasing?

Looks maybe like the opposite, there's way too much smoothing. I don't mind pixel perfect fonts or even aliased text but these just look like an aggressive blur was applied to everything

If you're seeing it blurry, the problem is likely your browser scaling it. Try downloading the photo and viewing it in a viewer with a 1:1 pixel ratio, like MS Paint. Alternatively, if you're on Chrome, running this in the dev console might scale it back for you:

  document.body.style.zoom = 1 / window.devicePixelRatio

If you're referring to the images from the README under the title "Screenshots" (currently https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/10835354/139717326... and https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/10835354/139717323...) then yeah, that text rendering is pretty bad.

Yes, the screenshots are excusable initially because they just look like the images have just been shrunk.

But that’s just an accurate reproduction of how it looks at full size!

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