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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI displays.

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Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...

I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.

Tbh though, is subpixel text rendering really all that important anymore when high resolution monitors are common now and low-dpi is the exception?

You should get outside your major metropolis and highly paid Western job once in a while. High-DPI monitors are the exception for most of the world.

It doesn't take being outside of the west for this to be relevant. Two places I currently frequent, A) the software development offices of a fortune 500 company, and B) the entire office & general-spaces (classrooms, computer labs, etc) of a sizeable university, have 1080p monitors for >80% of their entire monitor deployment.

Even then... my visibility is pretty bad, so earlier this year I upgraded to 45" 3440x1440 monitors, and even then I'm viewing at 125%, so subpixel fonts helps a lot in terms of readability, even if I cannot pick out the native pixels well.

They aren't high-dpi though, just big and still zoomed. On the plus side, it's very similar experience to two 4:3 monitors glued together... side by side apps on half the screen is a pretty great experience... on the down side, RDP session suck, may need to see if I can find a scaling RDP app.

Most people I know are on 1920x1080 LCDs. Over half of PC gamers seem to be on that resolution, for example: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

My gaming PC is also connected to a 1080p display because tbh for gaming that's good enough, but I don't whine about application text quality on that setup since it looks pretty bad with or without ClearType compared to a highdpi display ;)

Yea, I tried to give it a go on Fedora, but the terrible text rendering made it a insta-delete, for me.

ok for what reason we need sub-pixel rgb anti aliasing here???? does we run game engine for code??

Subpixel antialiasing of fonts is a pretty standard feature for a few decades. Without it, text can look fuzzy on certain displays.

> does we run game engine for code??

Zed literally does this; they render their UI using a graphics library just like a video game.

It's fun to see "GPU accelerated" and "like game engine" when literally every application is rendered the same way with the same APIs.

Last I checked I don't create a GL context to make a WPF app.

That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more legible at least.

> The Windows build uses DirectX 11 for rendering, and DirectWrite for text rendering, to match the Windows look and feel.

As I understand, DirectWrite font rendering uses Windows subpixel font rendering. It seems OK on my monitor (better than the linux version) but haven't done any pixel peeping.

They seem to have anticipated this issue and designed it accordingly!

I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually gave me a headache after a few hours.

I am confused about this. Doesn't Zed use CoreText on MacOS just as they use DirectWrite on windows. Shouldn't MacOS CoreText handle all this ?

Spitballing here, but subpixel rendering also requires integration with the rendering pipeline, specifically that you have the infrastructure to pass fractional offsets to the rasterization engine based on the concrete screen position of a glyph, and that the glyph atlas is a full RGBA texture (not just an alpha texture), and that the rasterizer knows about the particular texture format (RGBA vs BGRA etc.)

You don't _need_ fractional offsets no?

There's many ways to represent it, but the "sub" in "subpixel" does tell us that someone along the way needs to deal with fractional pixels. :-)

It does not imply fractional glyph positioning though. By itself subpixel rendering simply exploits knowledge about the configuration of the subpixels (red, green, blue) of the pixels on a particular raster display. (horizontal, vertical, what order,... ?)

If they’re like egui, they may render to a font atlas which complicates subpixel-AA.

I also backed out from using Zed a couple months ago, but since last week, Linux font rendering looks good to me both on full HD and HiDPI displays.

No lol

I installed Zed and tested out a bunch of fonts on my 1440p monitor. It looks decent, but not great. I think that's more a byproduct of Windows' awful font rendering in general though moreso than a Zed specific problem. VSCode is no better.

Seems like the only way to get high quality font rendering these days is a 4k+ display.

> Windows' awful font rendering

Just be aware that half the population prefers Windows font rendering.

Fair point. Maybe I should have said something about modern fonts not being properly hinted for windows instead of placing all the blame on the OS.

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