| I keep hearing people talk about how Linux font rendering is supposedly so bad, but I simply haven't noticed any issues with it since switching from Windows on my home machine over 3 years ago. > There is not even a hint of any consistency in the rendering either, thickness is all over the place even within a single glyph, with different strokes “sticking” together because of the lack of pixels: Only the "H" looks even a little bit wrong to me. > As you can see here, indeed, OS X had sub-pixel anti-aliasing in High Sierra, which provided less boldness and bluriness with somewhat better consistency in glyph thickness. However, colour fringing on High Sierra is rather apparent. Rendering is still rather blurry, closer to the FreeType auto-hinter than to what I would consider an optimal result. The "H" looks just as wrong with and without this feature to me. Overall the new version without the feature is indeed a little bit "bolder" and "blurrier" - and given that it's white on dark grey, I'm pretty sure I prefer it that way. > Thickness linearity between font sizes on the second image is fantastic. But compare the overall thickness at standard web font size (16px) to any other option and you will see that this comes at the cost of making everything bold by default: Only the v35 version looks noticeably "less bold" to me here, although the autohinted version is perhaps a bit more blurry. But it's hard to imagine how "thickness linearity" could ever be accomplished without causing this sort of blurriness. But maybe I'm just unbothered because I grew up with "luggable" Mac displays and bitmap fonts.... > With current state of Linux, it does not matter which engine you pick. They all are broken in the same way: I searched the page for matching words (or at least letter combinations) and the actual rendered text isn't showing the same issues for me as in the screen capture. > By the time I was updating this post in August 2019, Cairo received support for sub-pixel positioning in both xlib and image compositors. This means that GTK will soon have it too, as well as Pango and basically anything that relies on Cairo to render text. I am looking forward to the next Ubuntu LTS and might make a separate post about compiling this into the current Ubuntu LTS. ... Ah, I guess that must have happened, then. ---- On the other hand, GTK has caused me all kinds of problems. The default scrollbar theming is obnoxious, and if you fix it, it still doesn't seem to be consistently applied. Firefox does its own thing unless you look up an obscure about:config setting, and even then it still seems to mess up. GTK offers this really weird default style for window tabs(?) that required complete relearning, and that's with Cinnamon being supposedly designed for maximum Windows-alike-ness. Then there's the continued battle from GNOME to try to deny proper notifications and/or a system tray to everyone else. And don't even get me started on the file chooser. |