[haiku-development] Re: Haiku font rendering is not as good as Linux

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Michael Lotz<mmlr@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Unfortunately this is a topic where it comes down to personal
> preference.

Hehehe, I had the thought after sending the email that my preference
may not match that of other people.

> I for example absolutely hate subpixel font rendering, it
> looks blurry to me. I can hardly work on Macs becaue their font
> rendering looks so blurry to me that I get a headache from looking at
> it for longer times.

Well part of the problem with Macs is that they don't do font hinting
(adjusting the shape to render on the pixel grid) because I guess in
their minds the "purity" of the font shape has precedence over how
crisp it looks. So the blurriness isn't necessarily due to subpixel
rendering.

But I will say I sort of like the Mac rendering so that should give
you some idea of my preferences :)

My favorite currently is Linux though, oddly enough. The latest
rendering of fonts in IE8 also looks nice to me (I think they do
something different than Windows itself, of course.)

> Under Windows I generally disable font
> antialiasing completely, under Haiku I use grayscale antialiasing. From
> your screenshots, the Haiku one definitely looks better to me as well.

Fair enough.

> So IMO adding new modes is fine, but we shouldn't remove/change the
> others, because I am sure that there are people that think the current
> ones are better for them. Ideally we have a few to select from, so the
> user can decide what looks best to him.

Yeah that is probably the direction I would want to go. If you get a
chance take a look at how GNOME does it (the Font tab in the
Appearance settings.)

> I'm sure that someone coming
> from Windows who is used to Cleartype would favor the current subpixel
> rendering while someone coming from Mac OS X would rather want
> something "thicker", probably more in the direction you want to go.

I don't really like many of the choices that don't do font hinting on
either Linux or Haiku, so that may take more tweaking to get something
that looks more Mac-like. Though I'd be fine with not trying too hard
to emulate the Mac look. I mainly want something more like Linux, as I
said.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan

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