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Well, because it literally distorts the glyphs and thus doesn't actually look right, it would be like if some of the pixels on your screen were inexplicably the wrong color due to a color management issue. In some cases the distortion is really bad and doesn't even really improve legibility at all, so it's just a plain lose/lose. If you don't give a shit about typography in the least and don't care about the visual weight of text then fine, but not caring doesn't mean the behavior is correct by any means. (And keep in mind, you will often have more than one font size of text on screen at once, so this distortion will change the relative weight of fonts incorrectly, aside from also distorting the actual shape of glyphs.) But OK, other than just being incorrect, does it matter? Many people don't have proper color management in their software and it's usually fine. Well, yes, sometimes it matters. For one thing, this issue really screwed up scaling in Win32 and even GTK+2, because if you tried to render dialogs with different font sizes it would completely change the UI and screw up some of the component sizing. OK, though, you can fix that by just not using a fixed layout. However, you still run into this problem if you want to render something that actually does have a specific layout. The most obvious example of how this can be a serious problem is something like Microsoft Word that is meant to give you a WYSIWYG view of a document on paper, but the paper is 300+ DPI and the poor screen is only 96 DPI. Maybe most importantly, this is all pointless! We don't actually have to settle for these concessions for Latin script text on 96 DPI screens. Seriously, we really don't. I recommend this (old) article for a dive into the problems caused by non-scalable font rendering and how it could've probably been solved all along: https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/font_rast... (Though to be fair, there are still problems with the approach of vertical-only hinting, as it does cause distortion too.) |