GTK 4.14 To Provide Crisper Font Rendering, Better Fractional Scaling

[billyswong]

So they still refuse subpixel AA, or in their words RGB antialiasing.

No component alpha means one can't provide perfect subpixel AA *if* the background colour fluctuates or in some strange combo with the font colour. But come on, nobody is going to read text in ease if the background colour of the text fluctuates or don't provide good contrast with the text colour. This is throwing the baby out for stupid corner case. One only need 2 cases implemented: black text on white background + white text on dark background. Everything else can be emulated by adapting those 2 cases.

Another example of perfect is the enemy of good.

[mxan]

You know it’s bad when even Fedora patches GTK4 to get sane text rendering out of the box

[justinkb]

given how important font rendering is, you'd think this would be a solved problem by now

[devling]

given how important font rendering is, you'd think this would be a solved problem by now

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

[Monsterovich]

The death throes of a framework on which there are almost no applications. GTK3 is crippled, all the achievements of GTK2 are forgotten.

RIP

[ⲣⲂaggins]

Users of this release are knowingly being used as beta testers for the new renderer. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6411. I hope this doesn't end up being the version used in the next Ubuntu LTS.

[access]

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

NB: macOS does not use subpixel-AA.

[ⲣⲂaggins]

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

Isn't their solution just to throw a high resolution screen at it and render everything with no hinting and greyscale antialiasing? The same approach GTK4 took, at least until the hinting improvements in this release. Maybe one day they'll concede on the subpixel rendering too - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-..._requests/3393.

[Nocifer]

Ah, so I guess it was Gnome's font rendering and fractional scaling that birdie was whining about, not Wayland's?

given how important font rendering is, you'd think this would be a solved problem by now

This is Gnome we're talking about. They can't solve a problem unless they first deny it exists, then deny to fix it, then deny it's important enough to fix it, then deny to merge pull requests from third parties who put in the required work, then spend their limited resources on overengineering a new, NIH solution without consulting the wider community, then let the pull request stagnate for a few months or years, and then finally acknowledge that their previous stance has been wrong and assign a sane person to solve the issue sanely (which usually does a good job, thankfully).

This is also part of the reason why stuff like Wayland and Flatpaks are taking so... damn... long... to reach maturity.

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

Apple have heavily invested in HiDPI screens (Retina in their marketing speak) right from the get go, and their devices have enough pixels that they can afford to simply disable font hinting altogether and let the fonts align naturally to the display grid. That's as sharp as you can get, and that's the one thing that Macbooks are really worth it for, their displays.

[kruger]

Hopefully Firefox developers will have a look at this as I don't find the fonts in Firefox crisp!

Firefox has it's own renderer with widget.wayland.fractional-scale.enabled about:config option that makes text crisper with fractional scaling. Not enabled by default yet. On my system it breaks menu placement so it's not ready yet as of Firefox 123.0.