
A very detailed post at the Building Windows 8 blog
about the graphics subsystem in Windows 8 - very interesting. One part stood out to me, though: "The Metro style design language is typographically rich and a number of Metro style experiences are focused on providing an excellent reading experience. DirectWrite enables great typographic quality, super-fast processing of font data for rendering, and provides industry-leading global text support. We've continued to improve text performance in Windows 8 by optimizing our default text rendering in Metro style apps to deliver better performance and efficiency, while maintaining typographic quality and global text support." All this still doesn't explain why text rendering on Metro (so not the classic desktop)
had to be made as horrible as it is. Please, for the love of god, give us the option of turning ClearType's subpixel RGB optimisation back on for Metro applications. Fonts look horrible without it, which is kind of ironic given how font-heavy Metro is.
Member since:
2006-07-14
1) Consistency of the text goes completely out of the window. I imagine that is fairly jarring to the user.
The entire display is being rotated 90! That is jarring enough to completely obscure any minor font rendering changes.
How may hundreds of kilobytes would it take to have two font caches? Again the screen is being rotated 90 degrees, the entire display will have to be redrawn regardless.
Edited 2012-07-24 13:43 UTC