filipf added a comment.
In D14869#311447 <https://phabricator.kde.org/D14869#311447>, @oysteins wrote: > In D14869#309949 <https://phabricator.kde.org/D14869#309949>, @rkflx wrote: > > > F6198464: kubuntu10-kubunbtu11-win10-macos.png <https://phabricator.kde.org/F6198464> > > > I feel that Windows' font rendering produces significantly sharper fonts than anything else. FWIW I think it's both their choice of font (Segoe UI) and their ClearType technology that makes text in Windows easy to read even at 9pt. Increasing Noto Sans' size doesn't make it sharper in my eyes; perhaps AA and general font rendering is worth looking at. Possibly. But I bet what is more likely is that they set those values back when we didnt have FHD and touch screens and just stuck with it. That's Windows, they don't do as much revamping as much as they just add stuff on top of what already exists. But font rendering in Windows is also a mess. ClearType is an old technology from a different time and has been deprecated in favor of Greyscale (which is, funny enough, worse than ClearType because it's fuzzier). It was seen as an enhacement when it was implemented moreso because what they had before was awful and because screens were bad rather it being a great way to render fonts. Nowadays there may even be a 3rd type of rendering in Windows IIRC; they all co-exist in the same environment. But what's common to all of them is that they crudely alter fonts to artificially fit a pixel grid. In practice this usually means they thin them out and distort their proportions, making them either taller/shorter or wider/narrower than intended. Fonts also look jagged thanks to this. More real life consequences of distorting the typeface is that it ruins the vision the (non-Microsoft) font creator had for its font, that what is on the screen does not match printed material, that websites and PDFs may not look as you envisioned them etc. This is partly one of the reasons why design people prefer Macs and once you develop an eye for what fonts actually look like, you may also tend to see hinting as making fonts uglier. For instance, you can have a look at how Phabricator's Lato font looks like on your phone (provided the screen resolution isn't too shoddy) and then compare it with what hinting does to the font on the computer screen. On your phone it looks like it's supposed to. However, probably owing to most of Linux users being Windows users initially, from what I've seen the larger part of Linux community wants Freetype to be similar to Cleartype. This is not just unfortunate for the reasons mentioned above, but also because Freetype is already a great font renderer. I could provide plenty visual corroboration regarding this issue, but since this is not the topic here per se I just wanted to point out that there is a different approach than wanting "sharp" looking text. We could be going after fonts looking "crisp" instead, all the while remaining true to the typeface. REPOSITORY R119 Plasma Desktop REVISION DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/D14869 To: ngraham, #plasma, #kde_applications, valorie, #vdg Cc: oysteins, rooty, filipf, safaalfulaij, rikmills, harmathy, rkflx, abetts, davidedmundson, rizzitello, plasma-devel, ragreen, Pitel, ZrenBot, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, sebas, apol, mart
