4 ms·
It is infinitely scalable. What amelius is saying is that there's no font hinting at all ("at smaller pixel-sizes" probably meaning rather at small font sizes,
by pierrec 12y ago
It is infinitely scalable. What amelius is saying is that there's no font hinting at all ("at smaller pixel-sizes" probably meaning rather at small font sizes, which is when you need hinting).
Hinting is a very complex operation (basically, you align letter's lines with the pixels on the screen) which is only useful when the display's DPI is low enough that you can see the pixels on the screen. SVG was never really intended for these cases, it's rather intended for high-DPI, "next gen" displays. However, I'm not sure if low DPI screens will ever go away. So will SVG always have this "blurry text" problem?
Hinting would be a really cool feature to have but also very difficult to implement gracefully. Usually hinting is done differently on every OS - by the Freetype library on Linux, by ClearType on Windows, and not at all on OSX. That kind of thing is difficult to incorporate into a standard - Do we accept that it will look unpredictably different everywhere? Do we force every SVG renderer to ship with freetype?