Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
Text rendering is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder, and often preferences revolve around what people are used to more than anything else. Still, displays with higher and higher DPI have taken some of the guesswork out of text rendering, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park now.
I disagree. If I can read it without effort, its perfect. Any more time spent on it leads to greatly diminishing returns.
I’d add one extra criteria to that, it needs to not induce significant eye strain. It’s that part that’s difficult, because the little details like aliasing do matter there.
ahferroin7
Yes, but on the other hand it’s becoming much less important these days. Antialiasing and even subpixel rendering based on the structure of color pixels mattered far more with low res displays where individual pixels were still noticeable.
While it used to be necessary to oversample 2X, 4X, 8X in software/hardware to blur the pixel staircases produced by raw vector graphics, as displays move to 4k and even 8k, the features are so fine that these displays look better with no-AA than 1080P and lower with AA. More AA could still be better in theory, but it’s diminishing returns for something viewers would struggle to perceive under normal conditions.
What’s good enough for you is far from good enough for other people.
I don’t see the point in making ugly things when a much better option is in reach.
I agree Bill Bul Shooter, it’s a funny thing, that point at which form takes over function.
But I suppose if we only worried about function there would be no fashion industry, and the best functional piece of software would close the door on all other options, which is so far from reality it’s hardly worth discussing. I’ve had to assist people who have chosen a piece of software and want to stick with it because they like the splash screen or screensaver that come with it!
yeah you could probably guess my biggest frustration with clothes is the multiple options. I just want generic clothes that don’t hurt to wear and don’t have any distinct markings that would have me stand out. I’m still waiting for a slacker monthly cloths box that is cheap and functional.
These always bothered me:
– Why do emojis get to have colours? They are Unicode text as far as the renderer should be concerned and shouldn’t have colour.
– Why do “race emojis” even exist? Weren’t the yellow-coloured ones race-neutral enough considering no particular race on earth is bright yellow?
– Why such a complicated and open-ended problem such as emojis was shoehorned into Unicode?
1. Unicode has long had symbols that are useful outside of text, but still common for printing. Chess symbols, architecture symbols, mahjong tiles, etc. These long predate emoji’s inclusion in Unicode. and for many of them, color isn’t inappropriate at all.
2. The round, expressive faces are always yellow (They would look so weird if they weren’t!), but their actual color isn’t specified in the standard. Same with the emoji meant to represent people – color isn’t specified. However, “white” became the default for these, even though the majority of the earth’s population is non-white. Since these are meant to represent people, why not have a variety that actually represents people? Especially when the addition of different skin colors was done in a way that is backwards compatible with software that doesn’t support it?
3. Emoji initially became popular in Japan, where the various emoji were much more convenient than typing with the thee different character sets used in written Japanese. The problem was that each phone manufacturer had their own, so messages sent from one phone to another would convey a different meaning. In order to standardize character codes, the Unicode Consortium ended up being the most appropriate forum to do so, especially since they were sent via MMS or other messaging apps as Unicode text.
BTW I have mixed feelings about sub-pixel anti-aliasing: On one hand, it makes text on every desktop monitor look great, on the other hand it assumes a standard VA sub-pixel layout (slotted layout).
Even disregarding monitors that cheat via RGBW and pen-tile layouts, where you don’t get a solid pixel anyways, not everything out there is a VA panel. There are TVs with IPS monitors and there are also Plasmas.
Here is how an IPS layout looks like btw, but please note that in TVs the “chevron pattern s” are more pronounced.
http://lcdtech.info/en/tests/lcd.pixels.structure.htm
I have one such TV and up close, single-pixel vertical lines look almost skewered. So, sub-pixel AA is never too great looking.
Man, he didn’t even get to gamma correction and scaling.. Yeah text-rendering hates me.