> On 24 Jul 2018, at 11:30, Aliaksei Syrel <alex.sy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Peter, > > Thanks for the question and motivation to do a text rendering quality > comparison. > > I think you forgot that Pharo does not support "retina" or "hi-dpi" displays. > Imagine you have a laptop screen with the resolution of (3840x2160). Pixels > are so small, that UI gets almost unreadable. Therefore OS has to scale the > whole interface with for example scale factor 2 (can be changed in settings). > Interesting is that now programs think the resolution is 1920x1080. Pharo > thinks same too, so it renders the whole UI in 1080p and then it gets > upscaled to 4K which results in the blurry interface. > > Programs have to support "hi-dpi" screens explicitly. Bloc for example, when > opened in SDL2 native window supports retina screens and delivers very > beautiful graphics. > The process is quite simple: SDL2 windows provide two types of extent: > • window extent - scaled window size in dp (in our example it would be > 1080p) > • canvas extent - real canvas size in px (in our example it would be 4K) > we can get scale factor by dividing canvas extent / window extent. Next we > create a Bloc canvas of size equal to window canvas extent (4K) provided by > SDL2 and scale the whole graphic scene by previously computed scale factor 2 > while actually rendering everything in window extent coordinates (1080p). It > can be easily done since Bloc is vector graphics. I would like to emphasise > that everything in bloc is based on dp and not px. > > 1dp = 1px * scaling factor. > > Coming back to the text rendering issue :) > The correct experiment would be to take a non-retina monitor and do the > comparison, then take a retina monitor and repeat the same comparison process > making sure that all tested programs have support of retina screens. This way > we compare Bloc with web browsers in the same environment. > > Below are the results: > > (non-retina) > <Text Rendering Non-Retina.png> > > (retina) > <Text Rendering Retina.png> > > When zoomed-in (download pictures, they are .png) we can see that the text > rendering quality in Bloc is as good as in other modern web-browsers. Indeed, > there are very minor differences between all of them, but perceived quality > is on the same level, especially in "retina" case. Looks really impressive! > P.S. Compared on OSX with Arial font. > > Cheers, > Alex > > On 24 July 2018 at 10:09, Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com> wrote: > > > On 24 July 2018 at 15:07, Peter Uhnák <i.uh...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm trying to understand how exactly Pharo renders fonts and aliases them. > > I want to use Segoe UI (which is the default Windows 10 font for UI), however > when rendered in Pharo it is blurry, and for size 9 and light hinting it > actually produces incorrect size. > > Here is a comparsion (100%) > > <image.png> > and 300% > > <image.png> > > You can see how blurry and bold the fonts are compared to MS > word/Chrome/Firefox. Even Bloc should use the same rendering engine as > Firefox, but seems to suffer from the same^1. > (Note that fonts size 7 and 8 is ok... the font starts at size 8.) > > I've tried digging through the settings and FreeTypeSettings methods, but > couldn't find anything that would help me fix this. > > Any pointers appreciated. > > Thanks, > Peter > > ^1 Note for Bloc: I couldn't figure out how to specify the font size in > points instead of pixels, so maybe that's why it is much more compact > horizontally. > > Could you clarify... are "light" "normal" "full" and "none" done through > Morphic without Bloc ? > > Are you on a high-dpi screen? I'm not very familiar with this, but you could > try experimenting... > http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/ > https://www.howtogeek.com/175664/how-to-make-the-windows-desktop-work-well-on-high-dpi-displays-and-fix-blurry-fonts/ > > cheers -ben >
