4 ms·

I don't know, maybe the extra resolution is perceivable in the precise ends of strokes of ideographic Japanese, Chinese and related writing systems? If so, it i

by 6ren 15y ago

I don't know, maybe the extra resolution is perceivable in the precise ends of strokes of ideographic Japanese, Chinese and related writing systems? If so, it is a huge market. (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.) Also, 500 ppi is just unbelievably awesome - useful or not.

capnrefsmmat 15y ago
> (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.) Possibly. But operating systems have to go to great lengths to display text well, with subpixel antialiased rendering and all sorts of clever tricks to make the most out of the limited resolution. This often doesn't work well, leading to complaints like these: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All... If we get up to 500 ppi, that's well into inkjet-printer quality text without any antialiasing at all. Text would look rather nice. (Although I may be alone in peering at laser-printed text just to admire how smooth it is.)
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  I do agree that with a sufficiently high DPI, we can stop worrying so much about anti-aliasing and especially sub-pixel anti-aliasing The articles you mention don't so much represent cases of "doesn't work well" as "no one solution satisfies everyone"; that problem does indeed go away when you have enough DPI. (We still have to care about hinting, though, because among other things we want character boxes to overlap to avoid excessive whitespace in strings like "AV" or "Tr".)
  - panic 15y ago
    That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      As far as I know, the hinting instructions embedded in a font also includes information about how to do kerning for that font, as well as replacement glyphs for particular sets of adjacent characters (such as ff).

by 6ren 15y ago

capnrefsmmat 15y ago

> (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.) Possibly. But operating systems have to go to great lengths to display text well, with subpixel antialiased rendering and all sorts of clever tricks to make the most out of the limited resolution. This often doesn't work well, leading to complaints like these: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All... If we get up to 500 ppi, that's well into inkjet-printer quality text without any antialiasing at all. Text would look rather nice. (Although I may be alone in peering at laser-printed text just to admire how smooth it is.)

JoshTriplett 15y ago
I do agree that with a sufficiently high DPI, we can stop worrying so much about anti-aliasing and especially sub-pixel anti-aliasing The articles you mention don't so much represent cases of "doesn't work well" as "no one solution satisfies everyone"; that problem does indeed go away when you have enough DPI. (We still have to care about hinting, though, because among other things we want character boxes to overlap to avoid excessive whitespace in strings like "AV" or "Tr".)
- panic 15y ago
  That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    As far as I know, the hinting instructions embedded in a font also includes information about how to do kerning for that font, as well as replacement glyphs for particular sets of adjacent characters (such as ff).