6 ms·

The raster tragedy at low resolution (1997)

170 points by anon1385 15y ago

aidenn0 15y ago
Anyone else feel like your kids are going to not believe that this sort of thing had to be done as they grow up only with fine dot-pitch screens?
- mbell 15y ago
  I doubt the need for font hinting will go away any time soon. Most monitors are still roughly 96 dpi (same as mentioned in this article). Apple's retina display might be in the area where hinting doesn't matter as much. However, reaching 300 DPI for a largish computer monitor is really outside the realm possibility today for anything but a completely custom design. For a 30" 16:10 screen you'd need a resolution of ~7575 x 4750. You'd be seriously hard pressed to come up with a graphic card / cabling solution to handle that resolution.
  - to3m 15y ago
    Indeed. Also, 7575 x 4750 x 24bpp = ~96MB RGB framebuffer. Additionally: DPI of my 2011 laptop: 115dpi. DPI of my 2011 monitor: 100dpi. DPI of my 1997 monitor: 90dpi (100dpi possible at a rather ugly 60Hz) DPI of my 1993 monitor: 91dpi With this progress (or lack of) in mind, I think the pixel will be around for a while yet. Indeed, (thanks to LCDs) outside a few small-scale high-DPI places, pixels are more obviously visible than ever before! So why people are so sure that the pixel grid can just be ignored, I'll never know...
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - masklinn 15y ago
      > With this progress (or lack of) in mind IBM once produced 204dpi desktop screens (T220/T221, 3840×2400 in 22.2")
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    I don't think the spatial resolution of the LCD panel matters quite as much as the angular resolution relative to your eye. If your monitor is further away, you can get away with lower resolutions without being able to see individual pixels.
  - wtallis 15y ago
    DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays up to about 16-17", and 200dpi 24" displays. That's already good enough to toss out almost all font hinting, without any advances needed in graphics cards or cables. AMD's high-end GPUs can handle 6 monitors each running at 2560x1600, and can render 3d content at that resolution with useful performance.
    - to3m 15y ago
      Where are these monitors, that mean font hinting can be tossed aside? You'd think 300dpi screens were absolutely everywhere, and that only people still using 100dpi monstrosities were dinosaurs, sticks-in-the-mud, and your technophobic grandmother - all easily ignored! But that appears to be not the case. The majority of screens (probably all of them, pretty much, going by surface area...) seem to still be at the 100-150dpi resolution. Worse, the higher-DPI screens are on things like laptops, phones and tablets - all devices that have a limit on how far away from your eyes you can hold them! End result: grid still very much in evidence. People are so keen to do away with the very idea of the pixel grid, and just pretend it doesn't exist, but the technology to display the result is just not there yet! Are we going to have to put up with even more years of blurry fonts and coloured fringes, just so that people can pretend the future is here, when it blatantly is not?
    - masklinn 15y ago
      > DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays The problem isn't (and has not been in quite a long time) the content of the computer box, it's OS support for high-DPI screens and the price of screen hardware (IBM used to sell 204 dpi computer screens, 22.2" with a 3840×2400 resolution, you had to feed it with 4 DVI channels but it worked — for 2D anyway, the first generation shipped with a quad-gpu Matrox G200 MMS)
  - hoopadoop 15y ago
    It's already gone away.
micheljansen 15y ago
Fascinating piece of history. I wonder if this will all once become relevant again for some new kind of display technology which trades pixel density and color depth for some other desirable property (such as e-ink etc.).
huhtenberg 15y ago
It's an interesting read, but I just can't help but think that the tragedy lies with Microsoft and not the low resolution. It's 2011 and Apple has been doing font auto-hinting for ages, and so has been Adobe. Microsoft though still prefers to live in tragedy and defiantly clings to TrueType format and its horrendously labor-intensive manual hinting. I really don't know what's wrong with them, but for a fraction of Vista's 1bn budget they could've written a dozen of TTF auto-hinters.
- benhoyt 15y ago
  And in 2011, "live in tragedy" Microsoft can render fonts sharply, Apple can't. I'm a Windows guy temporarily using a Mac to write an iPad app, and the main thing that bugs me about OS X is how fuzzy the fonts look. In Windows, my fonts look ultra sharp on-screen; on Mac, fonts look fuzzy. Apparently it's because of this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... But I say to Apple: unless one's monitor has the dot pitch of the iPhone "retina display", your font rendering looks really fuzzy. <rant>What good is "preserving the typeface design" if it makes your eyes water?</rant>
  - baddox 15y ago
    Apparently, this is subjective. I agree with you that OS X fonts look awful, but it's clearly a deliberate design choice, and knowing Apple, I suspect there is at least one person who thought it over and genuinely thinks their font rendering is the better choice. I can't fathom why anyone would prefer OS X fonts, but apparently people do.
    - huhtenberg 15y ago
      The reason is rather simple - this makes all fonts on OS X look great-to-passable, while unhinted fonts on Windows look really bad and are simply unusable.
    - notJim 15y ago
      The (IMO, terrible) font rendering on Windows is actually the second biggest reason I strongly prefer OS X (the biggest reason is not relevant to this discussion.) So yes, this is quite subjective.
WalterBright 15y ago
What I find interesting is that the subtitles on DVDs, like "Deadwood" circa 2007 use a blocky font that looks like it was taken from a 1983 PC CGA card. Closed Captioning fonts are hardly better.
- __david__ 15y ago
  That's probably because your DVD player is rendering them. When I watch a movie with subtitles in VLC I get really nice smooth Helvetica.
  - danvet 15y ago
    Iirc DVD subtitles are actually a pre-rendered overlay stream. YUV (with uv subsampling) works great for pictures, not so much for text (and has only ever the original DVD resolution and hence fails at upscaling). VLC does indeed grab subtitles from the text and renders them crispy in the screen resolution.
    - ars 15y ago
      The pre-rendered ones are called subtitles, and the text is called closed captions. Not all DVDs have both, although a lot do. Some have just one or the other.
      - __david__ 15y ago
        It was my understanding that the difference between closed captions and subtitles was a semantic one--closed captions are for the hearing impaired and subtitles are for people that can hear but don't know the language. So closed captions have stuff like "door opens, a radio is playing an old tune in the background. Sheila: Hello" but with subtitles you'd just see "Hello" since if you can hear then you can infer everything else about the scene.
        jbri 15y ago
        There are sort of two different definitions at work here - the semantic definition which is as you describe, and then there's the technical definition which has to do with the implementation. "Subtitles" on a DVD are basically a 4-colour (3 + transparent) bitmap which is overlaid on the video stream. But DVDs also support the closed-captioning that was originally used for TV broadcasts, which is text embedded in the video signal that's decoded and displayed by the television set itself. Media playing software can extract subtitles from the latter system and display them in whatever font you like - but you can't do the same with the DVD-overlay subtitles, because they're just images.
a1k0n 15y ago
I really enjoyed this. I had a project once where I had to pre-render a font to be displayed at various (low) resolutions, and the Microsoft foundry fonts stood out as working exceptionally well at very small sizes. Almost nothing else was even acceptible at e.g. 6 or 7pt. I knew it was because of superior hinting, but I didn't realize how hinting worked, exactly, until now.
hmottestad 15y ago
A fun trick I like to do is tilt my head 90 degrees and look at the font on the screen. This way you realize how terrible the font and resolution really are.
TwoBit 15y ago
I disagree that "correct math looks wrong". You simply used the wrong correct math. Lots of other "correct maths" could produce even worse output. And some could produce better.
- ansgri 15y ago
  Indeed, «correct math» seems strange here, for interpretation of hints is equally correct as beziers.

170 points by anon1385 15y ago

Anyone else feel like your kids are going to not believe that this sort of thing had to be done as they grow up only with fine dot-pitch screens?

mbell 15y ago
I doubt the need for font hinting will go away any time soon. Most monitors are still roughly 96 dpi (same as mentioned in this article). Apple's retina display might be in the area where hinting doesn't matter as much. However, reaching 300 DPI for a largish computer monitor is really outside the realm possibility today for anything but a completely custom design. For a 30" 16:10 screen you'd need a resolution of ~7575 x 4750. You'd be seriously hard pressed to come up with a graphic card / cabling solution to handle that resolution.
- to3m 15y ago
  Indeed. Also, 7575 x 4750 x 24bpp = ~96MB RGB framebuffer. Additionally: DPI of my 2011 laptop: 115dpi. DPI of my 2011 monitor: 100dpi. DPI of my 1997 monitor: 90dpi (100dpi possible at a rather ugly 60Hz) DPI of my 1993 monitor: 91dpi With this progress (or lack of) in mind, I think the pixel will be around for a while yet. Indeed, (thanks to LCDs) outside a few small-scale high-DPI places, pixels are more obviously visible than ever before! So why people are so sure that the pixel grid can just be ignored, I'll never know...
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > With this progress (or lack of) in mind IBM once produced 204dpi desktop screens (T220/T221, 3840×2400 in 22.2")
- nitrogen 15y ago
  I don't think the spatial resolution of the LCD panel matters quite as much as the angular resolution relative to your eye. If your monitor is further away, you can get away with lower resolutions without being able to see individual pixels.
- wtallis 15y ago
  DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays up to about 16-17", and 200dpi 24" displays. That's already good enough to toss out almost all font hinting, without any advances needed in graphics cards or cables. AMD's high-end GPUs can handle 6 monitors each running at 2560x1600, and can render 3d content at that resolution with useful performance.
  - to3m 15y ago
    Where are these monitors, that mean font hinting can be tossed aside? You'd think 300dpi screens were absolutely everywhere, and that only people still using 100dpi monstrosities were dinosaurs, sticks-in-the-mud, and your technophobic grandmother - all easily ignored! But that appears to be not the case. The majority of screens (probably all of them, pretty much, going by surface area...) seem to still be at the 100-150dpi resolution. Worse, the higher-DPI screens are on things like laptops, phones and tablets - all devices that have a limit on how far away from your eyes you can hold them! End result: grid still very much in evidence. People are so keen to do away with the very idea of the pixel grid, and just pretend it doesn't exist, but the technology to display the result is just not there yet! Are we going to have to put up with even more years of blurry fonts and coloured fringes, just so that people can pretend the future is here, when it blatantly is not?
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays The problem isn't (and has not been in quite a long time) the content of the computer box, it's OS support for high-DPI screens and the price of screen hardware (IBM used to sell 204 dpi computer screens, 22.2" with a 3840×2400 resolution, you had to feed it with 4 DVI channels but it worked — for 2D anyway, the first generation shipped with a quad-gpu Matrox G200 MMS)
- hoopadoop 15y ago
  It's already gone away.

micheljansen 15y ago

Fascinating piece of history. I wonder if this will all once become relevant again for some new kind of display technology which trades pixel density and color depth for some other desirable property (such as e-ink etc.).

huhtenberg 15y ago

It's an interesting read, but I just can't help but think that the tragedy lies with Microsoft and not the low resolution. It's 2011 and Apple has been doing font auto-hinting for ages, and so has been Adobe. Microsoft though still prefers to live in tragedy and defiantly clings to TrueType format and its horrendously labor-intensive manual hinting. I really don't know what's wrong with them, but for a fraction of Vista's 1bn budget they could've written a dozen of TTF auto-hinters.

benhoyt 15y ago
And in 2011, "live in tragedy" Microsoft can render fonts sharply, Apple can't. I'm a Windows guy temporarily using a Mac to write an iPad app, and the main thing that bugs me about OS X is how fuzzy the fonts look. In Windows, my fonts look ultra sharp on-screen; on Mac, fonts look fuzzy. Apparently it's because of this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... But I say to Apple: unless one's monitor has the dot pitch of the iPhone "retina display", your font rendering looks really fuzzy. <rant>What good is "preserving the typeface design" if it makes your eyes water?</rant>
- baddox 15y ago
  Apparently, this is subjective. I agree with you that OS X fonts look awful, but it's clearly a deliberate design choice, and knowing Apple, I suspect there is at least one person who thought it over and genuinely thinks their font rendering is the better choice. I can't fathom why anyone would prefer OS X fonts, but apparently people do.
  - huhtenberg 15y ago
    The reason is rather simple - this makes all fonts on OS X look great-to-passable, while unhinted fonts on Windows look really bad and are simply unusable.
  - notJim 15y ago
    The (IMO, terrible) font rendering on Windows is actually the second biggest reason I strongly prefer OS X (the biggest reason is not relevant to this discussion.) So yes, this is quite subjective.

WalterBright 15y ago

What I find interesting is that the subtitles on DVDs, like "Deadwood" circa 2007 use a blocky font that looks like it was taken from a 1983 PC CGA card. Closed Captioning fonts are hardly better.

__david__ 15y ago
That's probably because your DVD player is rendering them. When I watch a movie with subtitles in VLC I get really nice smooth Helvetica.
- danvet 15y ago
  Iirc DVD subtitles are actually a pre-rendered overlay stream. YUV (with uv subsampling) works great for pictures, not so much for text (and has only ever the original DVD resolution and hence fails at upscaling). VLC does indeed grab subtitles from the text and renders them crispy in the screen resolution.
  - ars 15y ago
    The pre-rendered ones are called subtitles, and the text is called closed captions. Not all DVDs have both, although a lot do. Some have just one or the other.
    - __david__ 15y ago
      It was my understanding that the difference between closed captions and subtitles was a semantic one--closed captions are for the hearing impaired and subtitles are for people that can hear but don't know the language. So closed captions have stuff like "door opens, a radio is playing an old tune in the background. Sheila: Hello" but with subtitles you'd just see "Hello" since if you can hear then you can infer everything else about the scene.
      - jbri 15y ago
        There are sort of two different definitions at work here - the semantic definition which is as you describe, and then there's the technical definition which has to do with the implementation. "Subtitles" on a DVD are basically a 4-colour (3 + transparent) bitmap which is overlaid on the video stream. But DVDs also support the closed-captioning that was originally used for TV broadcasts, which is text embedded in the video signal that's decoded and displayed by the television set itself. Media playing software can extract subtitles from the latter system and display them in whatever font you like - but you can't do the same with the DVD-overlay subtitles, because they're just images.

a1k0n 15y ago

I really enjoyed this. I had a project once where I had to pre-render a font to be displayed at various (low) resolutions, and the Microsoft foundry fonts stood out as working exceptionally well at very small sizes. Almost nothing else was even acceptible at e.g. 6 or 7pt. I knew it was because of superior hinting, but I didn't realize how hinting worked, exactly, until now.

hmottestad 15y ago

A fun trick I like to do is tilt my head 90 degrees and look at the font on the screen. This way you realize how terrible the font and resolution really are.

TwoBit 15y ago

I disagree that "correct math looks wrong". You simply used the wrong correct math. Lots of other "correct maths" could produce even worse output. And some could produce better.

ansgri 15y ago
Indeed, «correct math» seems strange here, for interpretation of hints is equally correct as beziers.