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You most certainly can. The effect is applied when shading the text, so it does appear in screenshots, as would any other in-software AA technique (AFAIK). You

You most certainly can. The effect is applied when shading the text, so it does appear in screenshots, as would any other in-software AA technique (AFAIK). You can test this yourself in the browser. For instance, toggle subpixel AA using the CSS -webkit-font-smoothing property in Safari. There is a clear visible difference that you can screenshot. On some websites with a light-on-dark theme, disabling subpixel AA with CSS was an important part of improving visual consistency between browsers. It’s also important to explicitly control when working with animations that changes text scale or rotation. It’s easier to see with an enlarged screenshot, but you can totally see the difference at 1x.

pvg 8y ago
I don't know what you can toggle with CSS but I'm pretty sure you can't replicate 'thing rendering a font with knowledge of your physical display' with 'bitmap made of pixels and some CSS'.
- spiralganglion 8y ago
  The “knowledge” is applied when the text is rendered to the bitmap, not when the bitmap is pushed to the display. You’d be right if the effect happened quite late in the rendering process. It doesn’t — it happens really early.
  - rl3 8y ago
    Screenshots aren't very useful for meets-the-eye visual quality comparisons of subpixel AA unless your display has the same pixel arrangement and resolution as the display the screenshot was rendered on. Even then, there's probably other issues. I agree that they work for technical comparisons of rendered output.
  - pvg 8y ago
    Maybe I'm confused about something then but you seem to be telling me the subpixel AA is positionally independent. I can take the subpixel AA-ed bitmap and plop it in a page, open it on some other browser and OS and be certain everything is the same down to each coloured subpixel. You'd think every, say, vertical line would have the same colour artifacting, if that were the case. But they don't.
    - ubercow13 8y ago
      They do? They're just coloured pixels. When you open a bitmap image on different PCs and screens and display it at 1x wrt the monitor's pixels, you would expect every pixel to have the same colour across every PC/screen, no?
      - czr 8y ago
        The pixels will be the same on every PC/screen. The perceived sharpness/blurriness won't be–the whole point of the "color fringing" is that the subpixels of any particular display have an arrangement that can be exploited to add additional sharpness: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Antialias-vrs-Cromapixel.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Antialia... If the display you're viewing the image on has a different subpixel layout than the one that the image was rendered for, it won't look sharper.

pvg 8y ago

I don't know what you can toggle with CSS but I'm pretty sure you can't replicate 'thing rendering a font with knowledge of your physical display' with 'bitmap made of pixels and some CSS'.

spiralganglion 8y ago
The “knowledge” is applied when the text is rendered to the bitmap, not when the bitmap is pushed to the display. You’d be right if the effect happened quite late in the rendering process. It doesn’t — it happens really early.
- rl3 8y ago
  Screenshots aren't very useful for meets-the-eye visual quality comparisons of subpixel AA unless your display has the same pixel arrangement and resolution as the display the screenshot was rendered on. Even then, there's probably other issues. I agree that they work for technical comparisons of rendered output.
- pvg 8y ago
  Maybe I'm confused about something then but you seem to be telling me the subpixel AA is positionally independent. I can take the subpixel AA-ed bitmap and plop it in a page, open it on some other browser and OS and be certain everything is the same down to each coloured subpixel. You'd think every, say, vertical line would have the same colour artifacting, if that were the case. But they don't.
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    They do? They're just coloured pixels. When you open a bitmap image on different PCs and screens and display it at 1x wrt the monitor's pixels, you would expect every pixel to have the same colour across every PC/screen, no?
    - czr 8y ago
      The pixels will be the same on every PC/screen. The perceived sharpness/blurriness won't be–the whole point of the "color fringing" is that the subpixels of any particular display have an arrangement that can be exploited to add additional sharpness: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Antialias-vrs-Cromapixel.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Antialia... If the display you're viewing the image on has a different subpixel layout than the one that the image was rendered for, it won't look sharper.