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Such high resolution displays may sound like overkill for many people, but improved resolution is a big deal to those who care about screen typography—specifica
by Jongseong 13y ago
Such high resolution displays may sound like overkill for many people, but improved resolution is a big deal to those who care about screen typography—specifically, in layman's terms, about how fonts look on screen.
When displaying letters in small sizes, the pixel grid becomes increasingly coarse and the result often becomes ugly and less readable. To prevent this, "hinting" instructions need to be built into the fonts to help the type rendering, by fitting the horizontal and vertical strokes to the pixel grid, aligning heights, and so forth.
System fonts provided with Windows are professionally hinted, as are many professional webfonts. On the type rendering environments on Windows, hinting makes a huge difference.
The problem is, TrueType hinting—indispensable for TrueType fonts on Windows—is a complex, tedious process that only a very few specialists are able to do. I heard a few years ago that there was only one person who had the expertise to perform TrueType hinting on hangul (Korean alphabet) fonts.
The result is that many if not most fonts are either unhinted or more or less automatically hinted (which is recognizably below the quality of manually hinted fonts) as many typeface designers find the prospect of TrueType hinting daunting. Manually hinted fonts are more expensive.
If screen resolution improved so that unhinted fonts would still look good enough, that would vastly increase the choice of fonts that we can use for the screen. It would also free typeface designers of having to devote a significant chunk of font development on hinting.
These types of issues are even more important for some other writing systems. Chinese characters, for example, can be very dense with dozens of strokes packed into a single glyph, and would be illegible at a modest size on the screen if the resolution was not high enough.
Apple's approach to type rendering is less dependent on hinting, and it is not a coincidence that Apple has been leading the pack on high resolution displays as a way around the problems of rasterization.
Further reading: http://www.rastertragedy.com/ http://www.rastertragedy.com/
- chrisdone 13y agoI think everybody cares about high DPG typography, they just rarely have a choice in the matter. If you ask Joe bloggs on the street to choose the more readable text that they'd prefer between a display from 2001 and 2010 they'll choose the 2010 one every time. Nobody sells a cutting edge laptop with a lower screen resolution, so it's never a choice somebody has to make, so nobody really knows it's a thing, explicitly.
- Jongseong 13y agoI'm only relying on memory, but I don't think screen resolutions on high-end personal computers improved significantly between 2001 and 2010, even as drastic improvements were seen in smaller devices such as phones. The reason is that large screens with higher resolutions mean even more pixels, and a higher likelihood that one of them will fail during the manufacturing process, resulting in significant numbers of faulty screens that have to be discarded. So it wasn't seen as economically viable to increase screen resolutions much beyond 150 ppi or so.
- catinsocks 13y agoWe are only just starting to see higher ppis in bigger devices (retina macbooks, high ppi tablets, limited ultrabooks). But even the difference between a 13" laptop and 15" laptop is noticeably crisper when directly compared at the same resolution (1366x768 in recent years). Even going from an older 1680x1050 22" monitor to a 16:9 1920x1080 is a somewhat noticeable difference. However when you aren't comparing directly, or switching from one to the other, it is hard to see the clarity improvement. Looking at a 22" monitor from a retina display makes the fonts look blurry and off but if you start working on that monitor at the beginning of the day it isn't quite so bad.
- Jongseong 13y agoYes, as far as ppis on bigger devices, it feels like there has been much more progress in the past couple of years than in the decade preceding them. The difference is certainly noticeable in direct comparison, though most consumers are not likely to notice except in cases such as poorly hinted text.
- talmand 13y agoFor every designer out there that really cares about typography in their designs that has high end monitors that are expertly calibrated, most of your audience probably doesn't. Also check your work on a normal monitor.
- AJ007 13y agoIf your audience is on a smartphone or tablet released within the past two years, they probably are.
- talmand 13y agoWell, if your entire audience happens to be on smartphones and/or tablets in the two past years and have excellent eyesight, then sure. But those people still probably have crappy panels on their desktop and/or laptops.
- bluedino 13y agoEven better, you don't have to do subpixel hinting at 'retina' resolutions.
- devindotcom 13y agoI know, thank god!