Introducing DirectWrite (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Introducing DirectWrite (2011)

msdn.microsoft.com

26 pointsAkhilan6 comments

Edit: Apparently someone completely changed the title and the article? Ten seconds ago this was about how fonts are finally fixed in Chrome on Windows. See Akhilan's comment.

I suspect this will drop off the front-page in a flash now that the URL has been changed from something relevant and newsworthy to an introduction article about Microsoft's six year old font rendering API.

Original comment below:

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This is great and its very significant to HTML canvas users. Canvas fonts looked awful in Chrome (and FF) when pretty much any transformation matrix was applied before rendering fonts, but everything looks correct now. (This flag existed in April, but still had serious issues[1]. Those all seem fixed now.)

(For canvas in Chrome, letters used to kern so poorly they'd be stuck in each-other, or create letter-sized gaps, or have punctuation like commas in inappropriate places. Animation where a font "zoomed" looked like a text earthquake, as the glyphs shifted back and forth)

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=176351

When I looked an hour ago the link was pointing to the Devnet article but the title still mentioned Google.

Was that not the original link? The Google Code link is better but still lacks context as the significant piece of information is that this has hit Chrome beta - which is buried at the end of the very long Google Code page.

Mods - what happened here?

EDIT - my guess is that Akhilan posted with the Devnet link originally and hoped his top comment would add context. Akhilan - it doesn't really work like that on HN. It's best to post your own short blog post (or Tweet or Google+ or whatever) - give some context there and link to that.

We didn't change the url. As far as I can tell from the logs, no one did. A moderator changed the title from "Fonts in Google Chrome on Windows no longer look like they’re from the XP-era", which was a blatant violation of the HN guidelines. In addition, the post was flagged by users, probably because of that title.

Submitters: please read the HN guidelines and don't rewrite article titles to express your opinion. Please post an article that pertains to the news you have in mind. If no other article will do, you can always clarify the context by posting a comment to the thread.

Edit: I also just added "(2011)" to the title because https://web.archive.org/web/20111109050857/http://msdn.micro... makes it clear that it goes back at least that far.

Edit 2: If you or anyone else can suggest a better article, we'd be happy to change the url.

Chrome is finally rendering fonts with the advanced DirectWrite font rendering engine.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20140412/google-chrome-35-b...

I find DirectWrite to be a step down from GDI in terms of crispness and readability, and I don't think I'm alone.

Infinality on Linux can look great on the other hand, if configured properly.

Have you tried adjusting ClearType settings to match your preferences?

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