3 ms·

I'm curious: is font rendering speed something that regular user would notice in his day to day use? Maybe in battery life? Or is this important just for some s

by Drdrdrq 10y ago

I'm curious: is font rendering speed something that regular user would notice in his day to day use? Maybe in battery life? Or is this important just for some specialized (designers'?) use? I do hope this project gains traction, though the advantage I see is in replacing another piece of legacy code with safe(r) one (Rust).

moosingin3space 10y ago
A reduction in font rendering time would make it easier to meet higher framerates, especially on mobile when rendering CJK characters, as mentioned on the Reddit thread.
rspeer 10y ago
Right now you can basically DoS gnome-terminal on Ubuntu by sending it a screenful of Thai text (or any of many similar scripts where most adjacent letters have ligatures to each other, but Thai is by far the most common). It slows down to rendering like 40 characters per second. I work with multilingual corpora and I live in fear of accidentally scrolling into the Thai parts. I would report this bug but I don't know whose bug it is. So maybe I'm not a regular user, but font rendering speed is something I notice.
- anthk 10y ago
  gnome-terminal is slow. Try st, or rxvt.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    You must mean something else besides rxvt, which doesn't support Unicode.
    - welterde 10y ago
      Probably meant rxvt-unicode and not plain rxvt, which doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
      - rspeer 10y ago
        As a follow-up: I tried urxvt and st, despite the unfriendliness of the fact that you configure urxvt by looking up .Xresources incantations and you configure st by actually editing the code and recompiling it. It seems what we have here is a tradeoff: the font rendering in your terminal can be good, or it can be fast, but perhaps not both given the current options. urxvt and st are doing some kind of very low-level font rendering that doesn't match the fonts I see most of the time on Ubuntu. Whatever antialiasing algorithm they use, if you let them antialias, is a smudgy mess, and not something I would want to look at all day. The result only makes me appreciate more the idea that good, fast, text rendering is something that a new library could help us achieve.
        anthk 10y ago
        Edit ~/.fonts.conf https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Hinting https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Hint... I have the hinting style set to slight.

by Drdrdrq 10y ago

moosingin3space 10y ago

A reduction in font rendering time would make it easier to meet higher framerates, especially on mobile when rendering CJK characters, as mentioned on the Reddit thread.

rspeer 10y ago

Right now you can basically DoS gnome-terminal on Ubuntu by sending it a screenful of Thai text (or any of many similar scripts where most adjacent letters have ligatures to each other, but Thai is by far the most common). It slows down to rendering like 40 characters per second. I work with multilingual corpora and I live in fear of accidentally scrolling into the Thai parts. I would report this bug but I don't know whose bug it is. So maybe I'm not a regular user, but font rendering speed is something I notice.

anthk 10y ago
gnome-terminal is slow. Try st, or rxvt.
- rspeer 10y ago
  You must mean something else besides rxvt, which doesn't support Unicode.
  - welterde 10y ago
    Probably meant rxvt-unicode and not plain rxvt, which doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
    - rspeer 10y ago
      As a follow-up: I tried urxvt and st, despite the unfriendliness of the fact that you configure urxvt by looking up .Xresources incantations and you configure st by actually editing the code and recompiling it. It seems what we have here is a tradeoff: the font rendering in your terminal can be good, or it can be fast, but perhaps not both given the current options. urxvt and st are doing some kind of very low-level font rendering that doesn't match the fonts I see most of the time on Ubuntu. Whatever antialiasing algorithm they use, if you let them antialias, is a smudgy mess, and not something I would want to look at all day. The result only makes me appreciate more the idea that good, fast, text rendering is something that a new library could help us achieve.
      - anthk 10y ago
        Edit ~/.fonts.conf https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Hinting https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Hint... I have the hinting style set to slight.