Comment by meindnoch
1 day ago
Impressive work!
But subpixel AA is futile in my opinion. It was a nice hack in the aughts when we had 72dpi monitors, but on modern "retina" screens it's imperceptible. And for a teeny tiny improvement, you get many drawbacks:
- it only works over opaque backgrounds
- can't apply any effect on the rasterized results (e.g. resizing, mirroring, blurring, etc.)
- screenshots look bad when viewed on a different display
Getting rid of subpixel AA would be a huge simplification, but quite a lot of desktop users are still on low-DPI monitors. The Firefox hardware survey [1] reports that 16% of users have a display resolution of 1366x768.
This isn't just legacy hardware; 96dpi monitors and notebooks are still being produced today.
[1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
Even more strikingly, two-thirds are using a resolution of FHD or lower, and only around a sixth are using QHD or 4K. Low-DPI is still the predominant display situation on the desktop.
See also Linux Hardware Database (developer biased) [1] and Steam Hardware & Software Survey (gamer biased) [2].
[1] https://linux-hardware.org/?view=mon_resolution
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
What you're saying is "I have a high DPI screen, don't care about those who don't". Because these other arguments are really unimportant compared to the the better results of subpixel rendering where applicable.
Not sure about that. I don't really like subpixel rendering on a 100dpi screen very much because of color fringing. But add in the other disadvantages and it just seems not worth it.
Subpixel rendering is configurable. Some algorithms are patented, but the patents have expired. I'm not sure if the "good" algorithms have made it to all corners of computing. I use latest Kubuntu, slight hinting and subpixel rendering. It looks very good to me.
On my rarely used Windows partition, I have used ClearType Tuner (name?) to set up ClearType to my preferences. The results are still somewhat grainy and thin, but that's a general property of Windows font rendering.
Also, even if, as the author wishes, there were a protocol for learning the subpixel layout of a display, and that got widespread adoption, you can bet that some manufacturers would screw it up and cause rendering issues that would be very difficult for end users to understand.
This kind of problem has been dealt with before. It has a known solution:
- A protocol to ask the hardware
- A database of quirks about hardware that is known to provide wrong information
- A user override for when neither of the previous options do the job