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> Look at the text. Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a

> Look at the text. Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a bitmap font, in which case the look you'd get would be the creator's intent). You can get that with fonts that do not have proper hinting, but that can be fixed (assuming you dislike the result) by using another font. Regardless this isn't an issue with the entirety of CDE or the rendering it uses, but with the specific font used. > None of that is subjective. The very specific issue you mentioned isn't subjective indeed, again assuming that the font in question was not a bitmap font designed to look as it looks. And of course it is only about the font, nothing else. > In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity). TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. My comment was about trying to be more specific about what your issues were. > Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. For example personally i often make my own icons for Window Maker (my WM of choice) and i pretty much always lower the colors to introduce some ordered dithering that creates that common cross-hatching pattern (often i do not even care about the amount of colors, just whatever looks adds a bit of that pattern without losing much color info) that i personally find aesthetically pleasing. > Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer Yes that is also an objective issue. Not sure how hard it'd be to fix CDE use alpha blending, though the functionality is already provided by the X server as many window managers use it.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. > Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  > I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. You only mentioned fonts and what you mentioned was only true about vector fonts without any hinting information (which is what allows fonts to be displayed as the designer intended on fixed grid output like a pixel grid). It is not true for vector fonts with hinting information nor about bitmap fonts. And what your issue really was was about the binary-only representation, which basically means that what you wanted is subpixel accuracy - ie. introducing antialiasing. This is something that is actually subjective as many people (me included, as i already wrote) prefer the binary approach. And indeed while you are right about the very specific case of how vector fonts are displayed without enough precision, even when a font renderer does allow for subpixel precision many people prefer to alter the output from what the designer would do for -in their opinion- better results: this is one of the oldest differences between people preferring Mac OS X's font rendering (no alterations) over Windows rendering (alterations to make fonts look sharper). Many font rendering setups you'll find on Linux provide control over this too and while you can objectively say which setup would be more "correct", what exactly looks better is down to the user. Anyway, this was all about a specific case of font rendering and nothing else. > If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. CDE is not a renderer, it uses Motif and Xlib (and perhaps xcb in places) for its graphics. > Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? CDE uses Motif and Xlib, Motif does have the ability to render antialiased text via Xft which uses FreeType which is pretty much what most other toolkits use to perform font rasterization.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. I'm pretty sure the limited number of colours is exactly why CDE does this. At the time it was popular most X terms could only do a palette of 256 colours (from a larger number, I think 65535). Thus the dithering. In fact if you opened up an image viewer like xv (xview) it would switch palettes and make your other windows look weird. Just because it needed all the colours to display a picture decently. 24-bit + alpha channel greatness only became mainstream after CDE was already a thing of the past.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Yes, as i wrote in the part you quoted, back in the 80s and 90s this was a problem however nowadays the dithering is an aesthetic choice and not a CDE limitation. You can even see in the screenshot the Firefox icon using true color output (it sadly doesn't use alpha blending though, so this might actually be a CDE or Motif limitation - it shouldn't be impossible to fix it as the X server can do alpha blending nowadays but it needs someone to figure out where the limitation is and implement it)

chrisseaton 5y ago

> TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. > Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.

badsectoracula 5y ago
> I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. You only mentioned fonts and what you mentioned was only true about vector fonts without any hinting information (which is what allows fonts to be displayed as the designer intended on fixed grid output like a pixel grid). It is not true for vector fonts with hinting information nor about bitmap fonts. And what your issue really was was about the binary-only representation, which basically means that what you wanted is subpixel accuracy - ie. introducing antialiasing. This is something that is actually subjective as many people (me included, as i already wrote) prefer the binary approach. And indeed while you are right about the very specific case of how vector fonts are displayed without enough precision, even when a font renderer does allow for subpixel precision many people prefer to alter the output from what the designer would do for -in their opinion- better results: this is one of the oldest differences between people preferring Mac OS X's font rendering (no alterations) over Windows rendering (alterations to make fonts look sharper). Many font rendering setups you'll find on Linux provide control over this too and while you can objectively say which setup would be more "correct", what exactly looks better is down to the user. Anyway, this was all about a specific case of font rendering and nothing else. > If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. CDE is not a renderer, it uses Motif and Xlib (and perhaps xcb in places) for its graphics. > Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? CDE uses Motif and Xlib, Motif does have the ability to render antialiased text via Xft which uses FreeType which is pretty much what most other toolkits use to perform font rasterization.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

> The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. I'm pretty sure the limited number of colours is exactly why CDE does this. At the time it was popular most X terms could only do a palette of 256 colours (from a larger number, I think 65535). Thus the dithering. In fact if you opened up an image viewer like xv (xview) it would switch palettes and make your other windows look weird. Just because it needed all the colours to display a picture decently. 24-bit + alpha channel greatness only became mainstream after CDE was already a thing of the past.

badsectoracula 5y ago
Yes, as i wrote in the part you quoted, back in the 80s and 90s this was a problem however nowadays the dithering is an aesthetic choice and not a CDE limitation. You can even see in the screenshot the Firefox icon using true color output (it sadly doesn't use alpha blending though, so this might actually be a CDE or Motif limitation - it shouldn't be impossible to fix it as the X server can do alpha blending nowadays but it needs someone to figure out where the limitation is and implement it)