10 ms·

Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing (2012)

114 points by damir 5y ago

indymike 5y ago
Exactly controlled font rendering and color accuracy over the web are impossible to get exactly right because what is correct for one OS/GPU/screen combination will not be correct if you change OS or screen (and sometimes GPU).
rudian 5y ago
This is an old article and I think designers kinda stopped doing this because its effect is not as pronounced on high-res displays. Either way, 100% agree. Stop trying to change a OS’s text rendering, if you still are.
chronogram 5y ago
[2012] This isn’t relevant anymore. This flag only affects older versions of macOS.
- rudian 5y ago
  That's not true, I can replicate it in Chrome 96, macOS 11. It doesn't seem to work in Firefox though.
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    In Firefox, people historically used -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    - rudian 5y ago
      Yes, that’s what doesn’t work on my computer.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  And specifically macOS hasn't used subpixel antialiasing since 10.14 Mojave was released in 2018
mnw21cam 5y ago
Font smoothing method should be set system-wide, and not be under the control of a remote web page. What does the remote web page know about the kind of monitor the text is being viewed on? It could have a non-standard pixel layout, be rotated 90 degrees, be hiDPI, or be scaled.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Yeah, the > mobile devices don’t use subpixel rendering due to having to suport both vertical and horizontal screen orientations makes no sense... (well, except that doing it properly would be harder to implement)
  - maskros 5y ago
    "Subpixel" rendering (a.k.a. cleartype) that abuses color fringing to provide higher luminance resolution only works when you have pixels made of three RGB columns. Mobile screens usually use a pentile pattern, so this trick is not just more difficult, it's actually impossible.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      Also modern mobile phones have super high resolution screens so you don't need to bother. That's clearly the future for desktops too. At some point I would imagine subpixel hinting gets disabled entirely in desktop OSes but we just haven't got there yet.
      - jcelerier 5y ago
        the future is still far away. On a 17" 4k screen I could still see the difference.
        NavinF 5y ago
        This is unfortunately true. Fonts without cleartype are ugly af on my 4K 27” display and it’s very hard to find smaller (higher DPI) displays that support 4K, >60hz, and adaptive sync. I suspect that 8K displays will be “good enough” and 16K will finally make this hack obsolete in a few years, but we’re not there yet.
zozbot234 5y ago
> However, on Mac OS X, when this is reversed and you set light text on a dark background, you get a fairly ugly effect where the text becomes overly bold, spilling out of its lines. Wait, that's not supposed to happen. Most likely they're setting subpixel values without taking display gamma into account. This should be fixed properly in the rendering pipeline.
- elondaits 5y ago
  Maybe… but it’s been like that for years and years now (a decade, even?) so you can’t blame web designers for disabling subpixel smoothing in that scenario.
- nevir 5y ago
  This has been a known bug for well over a decade: https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ I wouldn't hold your breath on a rendering fix Apple 'fixed' it in 10.14 by disabling subpixel anti-aliasing all together (what this post argues against)
  - rob74 5y ago
    Well, as long as you use Hi-DPI (or "Retina", as Apple likes to call them) displays over your entire product line, subpixel rendering doesn't have as big of an impact anymore. I also suspect that's what's going on with the designers who are wont to disable subpixel rendering for their sites: they also mostly have Macs with Hi-DPI screens, so they don't see the benefit of subpixel rendering.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Apple’s MacBook Air, from 2019, was the last MacBook with a non-retina display - which was only 2 years ago.
    - NBJack 5y ago
      This goes out the window the moment you attach a second monitor for most folks. 1080p is very common; if we start talking about achieving retina at that resolution (say 220 DPI, a rough average across modern Macbooks), we're talking 10-inch displays. Even at 4k we're talking a max size of 19 inches or so before things get outside of Apple's ideal DPI. I can't speak for you, but for my work and current eyeglass prescription, 27 inches is my starting point for comfort. Even if I dislike it, Apple seems to have removed the global option to turn font smoothing off in Big Sur.
chrismorgan 5y ago
… not to be confused with the macOS concept that it has misnamed “font smoothing” which is absolutely nothing to do with font smoothing, but is instead glyph dilation—making fonts thicker than the designers intended them and than all other platforms (and anyone that turns it off in macOS’s settings) will get. I believe this to be a significant factor in many people using fonts at weight 300 at body sizes. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 for some more details.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Is this not simply stem darkening? Stem darkening is basically necessary to some extent for most renderers, for multiple different reasons depending on the implementation, otherwise glyphs come out far too thin. There's no "right" answer here
- vadfa 5y ago
  There is a ClearType configuration wizard that allows you to make fonts a bit thicker. I recommend doing it as a counterweight to that, especially on high DPI displays.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
rendaw 5y ago
They have images comparing subpixel and anti-aliased fonts, but if I understand correctly the subpixel interpolation takes place at a different level of the stack and the required metadata is lost when it's been rasterized... the subpixel example looks way blurrier than the anti-aliased example.
dwighttk 5y ago
>Mac OS X When was this written?
Semaphor 5y ago
What I (on Windows) found interesting, was that I thought the subpixel rendering screenshot looked clearly worse and more blurry… on my FHD Monitor. On a hunch, I dragged it to my WQHD Monitor and indeed, that reversed which of the 2 examples I found to be more blurry.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Your subpixel rendering settings need to align with the pixel layout of your monitor. Trying to smoothen text with a left-to-right BRG subpixel algorithm on a top-to-bottom GBR monitor, for example, will always look ugly. On Windows you can tune this for ClearType (I don't know the exact command, I usually just type "ClearType" into the start menu) and doing a test similar to what you would get in the optometrist's: a set of texts, and you pick which one is the best and if things get better or worse. If you have issues with blurry text, it could also be because of filters your monitors apply. Some using some kind of sharpering algorithm. Trying to tune the blurry monitor using some of the available websites might not be a bad idea in that case.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    It was the screenshot of the rendering. As far as I know, ClearType has no influence on that?
causi 5y ago
mobile devices don’t use subpixel rendering due to having to suport both vertical and horizontal screen orientations Sure about that? I would've thought the wildly varying subpixel layouts for the various display technologies and even generations of a particular technology would have a bigger impact. IPS subpixel layout looks nothing like an early PenTile layout which is different from a modern AMOLED layout.
- bogwog 5y ago
  I came to the comments just to ask about this part. Pretty much every desktop OS out there allows you to change the orientation of your monitors, and I haven't noticed any font rendering issues when doing so. A citation for that statement from the OP would be appreciated.
jeroenhd 5y ago
> feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows And then you get the exact opposite problem of macOS people trying to force macOS rendering onto other platforms because they prefer it. If you're going to advice people not to mess with these settings, don't make it apply to just your platform. Just don't touch these things unless you're going for some kind of retro feel or are foolish enough to try to do your own font rendering. Apple's weird "font smoothing" probably has more to do with the way glyps are artificially altered for aesthetics, anyway. Stick to the platform defaults, it's what your customers are used to. Font rendering is done through lots of subjective choices and personal preferences because there's no technical "correct" font. If one platform does it different, let it be different, don't force down whatever your preference is because you use an iPhone/Windows tablet/Linux computer. Funnily enough, Apple disagreed with this author and changed the way their subpixel algorithm worked years ago, so the author's preference clearly wasn't what the majority were expecting.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  > Funnily enough, Apple disagreed withtthis author and changed the way their subpixel algorithm worked years ago, so the author's preference clearly wasn't what the majority were expecting. Apple only changed it due to the prevalence of “retina” displays. When the pixel density of your screen is high enough, sub-pixel rendering stops making sense (your normal pixels are already small enough). You can just apply normal anti-aliasing and get the same result. This also has the advantage to remove all the super special font rendering code from your code base, no need to percolate font data through your entire rendering pipeline, just so you can do sub-pixel rendering in your final compositing and scaling step. Just push normal pixels, and treat everything the same. All of this doesn’t change the fact there might be situations where sub-pixel rendering still makes sense. It’s just the OS X no longer supports it.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    > All of this doesn’t change the fact there might be situations where sub-pixel rendering still makes sense. It’s just the OS X no longer supports it. Is that why fonts all look bad when I plug an external monitor into my Mac?
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Stop trying to fix everything to be honest, so tired of encountering text inputs in React web apps that don't have system wide spellchecking because some engineer decided they needed to roll their own input controls.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Spellchecking is browser-wide ?
  - jonhohle 5y ago
    On macOS (ne OS X) system wide spellcheck has been available for over a decade.
  - zeta0134 5y ago
    Not if a react component is reimplementing a textarea with JavaScript, which I've encountered in some enterprise apps. It's mildly infuriating, and breaks in lots of subtle ways.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Like... from the ground up, placing pixels around to form letters ?!
      - abdusco 5y ago
        Not really. It revolves around textarea not allowing rich inputs. That includes @-mentions, /-commands, block-based content builders etc. Textarea is laughably basic when it comes to adding interactivity to it, so the only solution is to use contentEditable[0][1], which is very difficult to work with or roll your own input[0], which makes OP angry. [0]: https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480 https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1... [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/contentEditable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
- 5y ago
syntaxfree 5y ago
Arguably much of the “infrastructure” and visual language for GUIs have evolved in the light background/dark text scenario, and “dark mode” has been pretty much improvised in the past couple of years. I work mostly in the daylight and thus mostly in light color schemes for coding (doubly so when I’m forced to use glossy screens) but I get the appeal of not having a full white spotlight in your face when coding something in bed at 3AM. But: I’d rather most of my screen be dark (eg with terminals) but still have my editor viewport to be light-background, even if it means shrinking it.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Windows classic themes have been a thing until the end of Windows 7. You could easily use whichever colours you wanted with these.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Hmm, have all designers that used to work with DOS (and similar) already retired ?
ribit 5y ago
I though sub pixel rendering (or anti-aliasing) was not needed at all on modern HiDPI displays? Why do you need to anti-alias anything if you are already rendering glyphs with sub(logical)pixel precision anyway?
- thih9 5y ago
  I guess the point is not sub pixel rendering itself, but having text that is as smooth as possible. I’d ask: why not?
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    My understanding is that on pre-retina displays, subpixel anti-aliasing was a fairly difficult, complex, and resource intensive technique that resulted in huge improvements in readability, and in the era of retina displays, it is a lot of complication that results in barely perceivable gains.
  - ribit 5y ago
    Well, the point is that traditional display technology had limited spatial resolution, which is exactly why algorithms like subpixel rendering were created — to improve the visual fidelity of text on an imperfect screen. The algorithms themselves are not without drawbacks — sensitivity to background colors, implementation complexity, caching cost, scalability etc. If the spatial resolution of the display is high enough that the font looks smooth with "normal" rendering, why bother with complex workarounds?
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Depends on screen size. FWIW: I can see aliasing on subtitles on my 70" 4k TV, sitting a few feet away. I have excellent eyes.
  - ribit 5y ago
    A 4K 70" TV is hardly a HiDPI screen...
defanor 5y ago
I find it undesirable to let individual documents (or applications) to change/control fonts and colours in general, and usually restricting font changes by websites in FF, but sometimes noticing that some websites still manage to mess up the fonts by adjusting finer rendering options, as described here. Though it appears to be an even more general trend than that: reinventing and worsening built-in web browser functionality with JS is another common activity, as non-web software is prone to reinventing system functionality (or settings), and I usually imagine that the intent there is to "fix" things too (or at least to make them look prettier). I wonder how much these "please stop" blog posts help: seems like they are supposed to raise awareness among developers, maybe to point it out to those who didn't think of it, but IME much of the awkwardness, especially in the UI, comes from non-tech-savvy client/user/management requirements: things must look good enough in a presentation, on their machines, and/or on common machines and systems at the time (though an argument can be made that it's the priority in many cases).
haroman 5y ago
It's different for each browser's rendering capabilities.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
This article should be suffixed with “(2012)”. In the past ten years, Macs (which this writer is mostly concerned with) have all adopted ultra high density “retina” displays, which… well I’m not going to say they render the arguments moot, but the changes are so drastic that they force every statement to be reevaluated. Also I could be mistaken but I believe as of about four years ago subpixel was dropped from Macs altogether.
- asadkn 5y ago
  MacOS dropped subpixel AA in Mojave by default but brought back a stronger default of grayscale AA in Big Sur AFAIK, which can be optimized. [1] And I agree, a lot has changed since the article was written. On HiDPI displays, personally I don't like subpixel antialiasing. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/jiwwga/big_sur_font_smoothing_antialiasing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/jiwwga/big_sur_f...
zajio1am 5y ago
> But upon closer inspection, antialiased text is always blurrier than subpixel rendered text. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s just how the rendering works. That is not generally true. It depends on font hinting and grid-fitting. With good grid-fitting, font rendering with disabled subpixel support is more sharp, as vertical lines are exactly aligned with pixel boundaries. That is why i disable it on my desktop.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yupyup54133 5y ago
I always use the links terminal browser test. If the site is usable in my terminal with the `links https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/ https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smooth...` command then it is well done. Chances are, if you are using any type of special font rendering to fix a UI issue you are also doing other things on that page that will cause it to not display properly in links. Also, shout out to the author for having their article actually render well in links!
butz 5y ago
Still relevant, although in different applications. GTK removed subpixel font rendering in GTK+4 (or more precisely, changes were made in Pango), that resulted in blurry fonts. Official explanation is that subpixel rendering is incompatible with transformations. Some work is being done on partial fixes, but results are not as good as current font rendering on GTK+3 applications. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

114 points by damir 5y ago

Exactly controlled font rendering and color accuracy over the web are impossible to get exactly right because what is correct for one OS/GPU/screen combination will not be correct if you change OS or screen (and sometimes GPU).

rudian 5y ago

This is an old article and I think designers kinda stopped doing this because its effect is not as pronounced on high-res displays. Either way, 100% agree. Stop trying to change a OS’s text rendering, if you still are.

chronogram 5y ago

[2012] This isn’t relevant anymore. This flag only affects older versions of macOS.

rudian 5y ago
That's not true, I can replicate it in Chrome 96, macOS 11. It doesn't seem to work in Firefox though.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  In Firefox, people historically used -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
  - rudian 5y ago
    Yes, that’s what doesn’t work on my computer.
kalleboo 5y ago
And specifically macOS hasn't used subpixel antialiasing since 10.14 Mojave was released in 2018

mnw21cam 5y ago

Font smoothing method should be set system-wide, and not be under the control of a remote web page. What does the remote web page know about the kind of monitor the text is being viewed on? It could have a non-standard pixel layout, be rotated 90 degrees, be hiDPI, or be scaled.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Yeah, the > mobile devices don’t use subpixel rendering due to having to suport both vertical and horizontal screen orientations makes no sense... (well, except that doing it properly would be harder to implement)
- maskros 5y ago
  "Subpixel" rendering (a.k.a. cleartype) that abuses color fringing to provide higher luminance resolution only works when you have pixels made of three RGB columns. Mobile screens usually use a pentile pattern, so this trick is not just more difficult, it's actually impossible.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Also modern mobile phones have super high resolution screens so you don't need to bother. That's clearly the future for desktops too. At some point I would imagine subpixel hinting gets disabled entirely in desktop OSes but we just haven't got there yet.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      the future is still far away. On a 17" 4k screen I could still see the difference.
      - NavinF 5y ago
        This is unfortunately true. Fonts without cleartype are ugly af on my 4K 27” display and it’s very hard to find smaller (higher DPI) displays that support 4K, >60hz, and adaptive sync. I suspect that 8K displays will be “good enough” and 16K will finally make this hack obsolete in a few years, but we’re not there yet.

zozbot234 5y ago

> However, on Mac OS X, when this is reversed and you set light text on a dark background, you get a fairly ugly effect where the text becomes overly bold, spilling out of its lines. Wait, that's not supposed to happen. Most likely they're setting subpixel values without taking display gamma into account. This should be fixed properly in the rendering pipeline.

elondaits 5y ago
Maybe… but it’s been like that for years and years now (a decade, even?) so you can’t blame web designers for disabling subpixel smoothing in that scenario.
nevir 5y ago
This has been a known bug for well over a decade: https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ I wouldn't hold your breath on a rendering fix Apple 'fixed' it in 10.14 by disabling subpixel anti-aliasing all together (what this post argues against)
- rob74 5y ago
  Well, as long as you use Hi-DPI (or "Retina", as Apple likes to call them) displays over your entire product line, subpixel rendering doesn't have as big of an impact anymore. I also suspect that's what's going on with the designers who are wont to disable subpixel rendering for their sites: they also mostly have Macs with Hi-DPI screens, so they don't see the benefit of subpixel rendering.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Apple’s MacBook Air, from 2019, was the last MacBook with a non-retina display - which was only 2 years ago.
  - NBJack 5y ago
    This goes out the window the moment you attach a second monitor for most folks. 1080p is very common; if we start talking about achieving retina at that resolution (say 220 DPI, a rough average across modern Macbooks), we're talking 10-inch displays. Even at 4k we're talking a max size of 19 inches or so before things get outside of Apple's ideal DPI. I can't speak for you, but for my work and current eyeglass prescription, 27 inches is my starting point for comfort. Even if I dislike it, Apple seems to have removed the global option to turn font smoothing off in Big Sur.

chrismorgan 5y ago

… not to be confused with the macOS concept that it has misnamed “font smoothing” which is absolutely nothing to do with font smoothing, but is instead glyph dilation—making fonts thicker than the designers intended them and than all other platforms (and anyone that turns it off in macOS’s settings) will get. I believe this to be a significant factor in many people using fonts at weight 300 at body sizes. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 for some more details.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
Is this not simply stem darkening? Stem darkening is basically necessary to some extent for most renderers, for multiple different reasons depending on the implementation, otherwise glyphs come out far too thin. There's no "right" answer here
vadfa 5y ago
There is a ClearType configuration wizard that allows you to make fonts a bit thicker. I recommend doing it as a counterweight to that, especially on high DPI displays.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

rendaw 5y ago

They have images comparing subpixel and anti-aliased fonts, but if I understand correctly the subpixel interpolation takes place at a different level of the stack and the required metadata is lost when it's been rasterized... the subpixel example looks way blurrier than the anti-aliased example.

dwighttk 5y ago

>Mac OS X When was this written?

Semaphor 5y ago

What I (on Windows) found interesting, was that I thought the subpixel rendering screenshot looked clearly worse and more blurry… on my FHD Monitor. On a hunch, I dragged it to my WQHD Monitor and indeed, that reversed which of the 2 examples I found to be more blurry.

jeroenhd 5y ago
Your subpixel rendering settings need to align with the pixel layout of your monitor. Trying to smoothen text with a left-to-right BRG subpixel algorithm on a top-to-bottom GBR monitor, for example, will always look ugly. On Windows you can tune this for ClearType (I don't know the exact command, I usually just type "ClearType" into the start menu) and doing a test similar to what you would get in the optometrist's: a set of texts, and you pick which one is the best and if things get better or worse. If you have issues with blurry text, it could also be because of filters your monitors apply. Some using some kind of sharpering algorithm. Trying to tune the blurry monitor using some of the available websites might not be a bad idea in that case.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  It was the screenshot of the rendering. As far as I know, ClearType has no influence on that?

causi 5y ago

mobile devices don’t use subpixel rendering due to having to suport both vertical and horizontal screen orientations Sure about that? I would've thought the wildly varying subpixel layouts for the various display technologies and even generations of a particular technology would have a bigger impact. IPS subpixel layout looks nothing like an early PenTile layout which is different from a modern AMOLED layout.

bogwog 5y ago
I came to the comments just to ask about this part. Pretty much every desktop OS out there allows you to change the orientation of your monitors, and I haven't noticed any font rendering issues when doing so. A citation for that statement from the OP would be appreciated.

jeroenhd 5y ago

> feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows And then you get the exact opposite problem of macOS people trying to force macOS rendering onto other platforms because they prefer it. If you're going to advice people not to mess with these settings, don't make it apply to just your platform. Just don't touch these things unless you're going for some kind of retro feel or are foolish enough to try to do your own font rendering. Apple's weird "font smoothing" probably has more to do with the way glyps are artificially altered for aesthetics, anyway. Stick to the platform defaults, it's what your customers are used to. Font rendering is done through lots of subjective choices and personal preferences because there's no technical "correct" font. If one platform does it different, let it be different, don't force down whatever your preference is because you use an iPhone/Windows tablet/Linux computer. Funnily enough, Apple disagreed with this author and changed the way their subpixel algorithm worked years ago, so the author's preference clearly wasn't what the majority were expecting.

avianlyric 5y ago
> Funnily enough, Apple disagreed withtthis author and changed the way their subpixel algorithm worked years ago, so the author's preference clearly wasn't what the majority were expecting. Apple only changed it due to the prevalence of “retina” displays. When the pixel density of your screen is high enough, sub-pixel rendering stops making sense (your normal pixels are already small enough). You can just apply normal anti-aliasing and get the same result. This also has the advantage to remove all the super special font rendering code from your code base, no need to percolate font data through your entire rendering pipeline, just so you can do sub-pixel rendering in your final compositing and scaling step. Just push normal pixels, and treat everything the same. All of this doesn’t change the fact there might be situations where sub-pixel rendering still makes sense. It’s just the OS X no longer supports it.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > All of this doesn’t change the fact there might be situations where sub-pixel rendering still makes sense. It’s just the OS X no longer supports it. Is that why fonts all look bad when I plug an external monitor into my Mac?

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Stop trying to fix everything to be honest, so tired of encountering text inputs in React web apps that don't have system wide spellchecking because some engineer decided they needed to roll their own input controls.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Spellchecking is browser-wide ?
- jonhohle 5y ago
  On macOS (ne OS X) system wide spellcheck has been available for over a decade.
- zeta0134 5y ago
  Not if a react component is reimplementing a textarea with JavaScript, which I've encountered in some enterprise apps. It's mildly infuriating, and breaks in lots of subtle ways.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Like... from the ground up, placing pixels around to form letters ?!
    - abdusco 5y ago
      Not really. It revolves around textarea not allowing rich inputs. That includes @-mentions, /-commands, block-based content builders etc. Textarea is laughably basic when it comes to adding interactivity to it, so the only solution is to use contentEditable[0][1], which is very difficult to work with or roll your own input[0], which makes OP angry. [0]: https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480 https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1... [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/contentEditable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
5y ago

syntaxfree 5y ago

Arguably much of the “infrastructure” and visual language for GUIs have evolved in the light background/dark text scenario, and “dark mode” has been pretty much improvised in the past couple of years. I work mostly in the daylight and thus mostly in light color schemes for coding (doubly so when I’m forced to use glossy screens) but I get the appeal of not having a full white spotlight in your face when coding something in bed at 3AM. But: I’d rather most of my screen be dark (eg with terminals) but still have my editor viewport to be light-background, even if it means shrinking it.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Windows classic themes have been a thing until the end of Windows 7. You could easily use whichever colours you wanted with these.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
Hmm, have all designers that used to work with DOS (and similar) already retired ?

ribit 5y ago

I though sub pixel rendering (or anti-aliasing) was not needed at all on modern HiDPI displays? Why do you need to anti-alias anything if you are already rendering glyphs with sub(logical)pixel precision anyway?

thih9 5y ago
I guess the point is not sub pixel rendering itself, but having text that is as smooth as possible. I’d ask: why not?
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  My understanding is that on pre-retina displays, subpixel anti-aliasing was a fairly difficult, complex, and resource intensive technique that resulted in huge improvements in readability, and in the era of retina displays, it is a lot of complication that results in barely perceivable gains.
- ribit 5y ago
  Well, the point is that traditional display technology had limited spatial resolution, which is exactly why algorithms like subpixel rendering were created — to improve the visual fidelity of text on an imperfect screen. The algorithms themselves are not without drawbacks — sensitivity to background colors, implementation complexity, caching cost, scalability etc. If the spatial resolution of the display is high enough that the font looks smooth with "normal" rendering, why bother with complex workarounds?
gwbas1c 5y ago
Depends on screen size. FWIW: I can see aliasing on subtitles on my 70" 4k TV, sitting a few feet away. I have excellent eyes.
- ribit 5y ago
  A 4K 70" TV is hardly a HiDPI screen...

defanor 5y ago

I find it undesirable to let individual documents (or applications) to change/control fonts and colours in general, and usually restricting font changes by websites in FF, but sometimes noticing that some websites still manage to mess up the fonts by adjusting finer rendering options, as described here. Though it appears to be an even more general trend than that: reinventing and worsening built-in web browser functionality with JS is another common activity, as non-web software is prone to reinventing system functionality (or settings), and I usually imagine that the intent there is to "fix" things too (or at least to make them look prettier). I wonder how much these "please stop" blog posts help: seems like they are supposed to raise awareness among developers, maybe to point it out to those who didn't think of it, but IME much of the awkwardness, especially in the UI, comes from non-tech-savvy client/user/management requirements: things must look good enough in a presentation, on their machines, and/or on common machines and systems at the time (though an argument can be made that it's the priority in many cases).

haroman 5y ago

It's different for each browser's rendering capabilities.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago

This article should be suffixed with “(2012)”. In the past ten years, Macs (which this writer is mostly concerned with) have all adopted ultra high density “retina” displays, which… well I’m not going to say they render the arguments moot, but the changes are so drastic that they force every statement to be reevaluated. Also I could be mistaken but I believe as of about four years ago subpixel was dropped from Macs altogether.

asadkn 5y ago
MacOS dropped subpixel AA in Mojave by default but brought back a stronger default of grayscale AA in Big Sur AFAIK, which can be optimized. [1] And I agree, a lot has changed since the article was written. On HiDPI displays, personally I don't like subpixel antialiasing. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/jiwwga/big_sur_font_smoothing_antialiasing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/jiwwga/big_sur_f...

zajio1am 5y ago

> But upon closer inspection, antialiased text is always blurrier than subpixel rendered text. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s just how the rendering works. That is not generally true. It depends on font hinting and grid-fitting. With good grid-fitting, font rendering with disabled subpixel support is more sharp, as vertical lines are exactly aligned with pixel boundaries. That is why i disable it on my desktop.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yupyup54133 5y ago

I always use the links terminal browser test. If the site is usable in my terminal with the `links https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/ https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smooth...` command then it is well done. Chances are, if you are using any type of special font rendering to fix a UI issue you are also doing other things on that page that will cause it to not display properly in links. Also, shout out to the author for having their article actually render well in links!

butz 5y ago

Still relevant, although in different applications. GTK removed subpixel font rendering in GTK+4 (or more precisely, changes were made in Pango), that resulted in blurry fonts. Official explanation is that subpixel rendering is incompatible with transformations. Some work is being done on partial fixes, but results are not as good as current font rendering on GTK+3 applications. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787