GTK 4.14 To Provide Crisper Font Rendering, Better Fractional Scaling

[mb_q]

This is an unavoidable consequence of doing scaling on the raster level... On the web it is now pretty clear that the proper way to size things is to use per-cents and ems, but GTK has to have fractional pesudo-pixels.

[Vistaus]

But why? GTK devs had said in the relevant bug report that there was nothing wrong with the font rendering and that there was no sharpness metric. So what have they fixed to achieve this then? Is it a placebo effect, but they put it in the changelog anyway to appease to some of the people that complained, but won't look at the code?

[avis]

We are not using subpixel rendering (aka Cleartype, or rgb antialiasing) in GTK 4, since our compositing does not have component alpha. Our antialiasing for fonts is always grayscale

Whoa, I didn't know GTK4 was so utterly bad. Thanks god I don't have or use a single app based on GTK4.

I wonder what I'll do once XFCE inevitably faces the prospect of migrating from GTK3. That will be a disaster.

[You-]

But why? GTK devs had said in the relevant bug report that there was nothing wrong with the font rendering and that there was no sharpness metric.

Sharpness and accuracy can be opposites in the font world. You cannot decide that a rendering is better solely based on sharpness.

Otherwise you will end up with WindowsXP rendering (with MS cleartype turned off).

[hf_139]

Whoa, I didn't know GTK4 was so utterly bad. Thanks god I don't have or use a single app based on GTK4.

I wonder what I'll do once XFCE inevitably faces the prospect of migrating from GTK3. That will be a disaster.

When that becomes relevant, LXQt and COSMIC will be here to save the day.
And Budgies migration from GTK to EFL could become great.

[bug77]

Sharpness and accuracy can be opposites in the font world. You cannot decide that a rendering is better solely based on sharpness.

Otherwise you will end up with WindowsXP rendering (with MS cleartype turned off).

You are right, in a way. Perfect sharpness means no anti-aliasing at all.
But from there on, there are mathematical means to measure how far you are deviating. You want to apply a little softness, but letting rendering become too soft will result in color bleeding.

[bug77]

The updated toolkit will yield more crisp font rendering

Cue "fonts are too sharp now" complaints in 3, 2, 1!

[Shiba]

Still no RGB subpixel.

[ssokolow]

Sharpness and accuracy can be opposites in the font world. You cannot decide that a rendering is better solely based on sharpness.

Otherwise you will end up with WindowsXP rendering (with MS cleartype turned off).

I recently jumped on a New Old Stock thin client old enough to run Windows 98 SE once the disk-on-module has been swapped out for something bigger... having it running on the VGA input of the left-most of my three-monitor spread really makes me realize how low my standards have sunk for text crispness compared to the days when moving from a CRT to my first desktop LCD made me breathe a sigh of relief at having "come home" to what a childhood on my father's office laptops taught me to expect.

Definitely need to find time to play with my KDE font hinting settings to try to match Windows 98 SE without paying the extra money and electricity to do the same things in high DPI.

[yump]

The screenshots are definitely an improvement. Those "e" and "y"s with the old renderer are gross. It almost looks like a dyslexic-accessible font. However, there's still a ways to go.

If they tell us to do hinting, we round the glyph position to an integral device pixel in the y direction. Why only y? The autohinter only applies hinting in the vertical direction and the horizontal direction is where the increased resolution of subpixel positions helps most.

Subpixel coordinates are not subpixel positions without subpixel AA, Mattias. Vertical-only hinting is intended for use on hRGB screens!

(anything above 240 dpi should be ok). Sadly, we don’t live in a world where most laptop screens have that kind of resolution, so we can’t just ignore pixels.

Still holding onto that dream, I see. I've never seen a resolution that high on anything that wasn't a cellphone. Much less most laptops. In the desktop monitor market, if you *explicitly seek out* a display that is high resolution for its size, the highest you will find is... 163 PPI. It seems that the wisdom of the crowd prefers low cost and high refresh rates and brightness to making GUI toolkit developers' jobs easier.

Luckily, the old toolkits, that were designed for displays that actually exist, still work.