Hacker News Reader

Comment by DinaCoder99 | Hacker News Reader

> Attach a MacMini to a non-HiDPI display and you could recognize that the font rendering is awkward.

Ironically for "always expose relevant options through system settings" Apple, you can still access font smoothing via command line, e.g. "defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3". You can use 0-3 where 0 disables it (default) and 3 uses "strong" hinting, with 1 and 2 in between.

View on HN

That option used to have a UI selection back in Leopard! I have no idea why they removed it in Snow Leopard but left the functionality there.

Nit: the option does not hint, it emboldens text, as in, smears it a bit to make it appear thicker. And I think the default is actually 2?

Well whatever it does, I actually prefer it to hinting and always have. Whatever happens on linux makes the fonts look too thin for my personal taste.

Regardless, I hope everyone agrees that hi dpi + no hinting (or smearing) looks the best.

i always disliked hinting aswell, but thankfully one can just disable hinting on linux, and then fonts actually look fairly similar to what osx did(~10-15 years ago)

Full hinting is a must-have if you turn AA off and use fonts that were designed to be hinted to a pixel grid.

Fonts have several distinct periods where they were designed expecting that renderers would function a certain way. File format notwithstanding, one size does not fit all. You really do need to match your font to your renderer's settings.

You can also match your renderer's settings to your font, and have it different for different fonts, via fontconfig. But actually using that is pretty advanced.

that may well be, but for me, I choose no hinting, with AA activated, and if a font does not look good, I simply do not use it.

IF i specifically REALLY wanted a font that required hinting to look good, I would make a special config for that particular font, but I would need some serious advantage to bother doing that

Why not use slight hinting then? FreeType explains it as only using the vertical hint but not the horizontal one and they recommend this as working well with cleartype fonts and pretty well with non-cleartype fonts.

If hinting makes the fonts "too thin", your display gamma is probably misconfigured. That kind of artifact is a common side-effect of graphical operations being performed in the wrong gamma space.

Yes, there is an issue with freetype where the gamma is different between otf and ttf fonts. otf will apply the gamma automatically, but for ttf you have to force stem darkening at the current time.

I don't see how that would affect a screenshot—the difference is clearly visible in screenshots. Furthermore the differences between Mac, Linux, and Window font rendering are widely discussed on the internet. I think I just prefer the way that Apple chose to render fonts.

This blog post seems to lay out the tradeoff between, at least, Windows and Mac font rendering: https://blog.typekit.com/2010/10/15/type-rendering-operating...

You're right -- the default is 2, not 3.

I find 1 is a reasonable compromise in practice. I think of it as simulating a little paper ink bleed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com