3 ms·
> (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 subpixe
by 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 agoI 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 agoThat's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoAs 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).