[haiku-development] Re: Default Font Choice In Haiku should likely be changed
- From: pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:19:52 +0200
> You know, I keep asking why the fonts look better or worse, and I
> think its a screen ratio thing. Plus at higher resolutions the
> readability goes down allot. Looks ok at a 4:3 with a total horizontal
> of say 12xx but not so good at 16:9 at 1920h.
It's very, very likely completely unrelated to the aspect ratio.
The differences could be at various levels between your monitors :
* BGR vs RGB pixel order mayy mess up everything when using subpixel
rendering
* Using a VGA connector where DVI would work better
* The monitor itself filtering things in various ways (may or may not be
configurable in some OSD menu)
* And finally, the screen DPI resolution.
Windows assumes every monitor is at 96dpi. This is, unfortunately, false most
of the time. For example, my laptop has a 120dpi resolution.
The font should be rendered with more pixels for the same point-size, in
order to keep the physical size (in inches/centimeters) constant accross
monitors. I don't think we're doing it yet in Haiku.
An example of a system which does that is Android. They have to deal with
screen densities from 85dpi to >300, so the UI of apps just has to scale and
can't be tied to pixels.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html#density-independence
Doing this would avoid the issue of the font looking too small on high-dpi
screens. I think it would mostly solve the problem with the font looking
blurry as well, since it would just give more pixels per character and allow
better hinting. Note the droid font has agressive hinting at small sizes
because of that : on lower density screen, it must still look as sharp as
possible. The result is distorted characters (bent to match the pixel grid).
DejaVu, on the other hand, keeps the character shape as much as possible. At
small sizes, the result is the text looks a bit more blurry.
Note that I still use a 9pt font on my 120dpi screen, so it's a lot smaller
than the default, and I like it that way. I feel honouring the dpi as
reported by the screen would make everything look ridiculously big (and I see
it hapenning on linux, where I put everything at 9 or 10pt to get a
reasonable font size). Matter of taste, as you see :)
--
Adrien.
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