On 12/7/21 4:58 AM, Eric Bresie wrote:
I know this is a grander, not a short term thing, and a little out of scope here but would transition the UI of Netbeans from Swing to JavaFX based with its own (css) theme paradigm be of value?
There is one important difference between Swing and JavaFX that might not be immediately apparent: JavaFX, as a policy, does not use font hinting. Swing, on the other hand, uses full hinting.
For comparison, Windows uses full hinting, macOS does not use font hinting, and most Linux distributions use the light (slight) hinting of FreeType. In fact, macOS even stopped using sub-pixel rendering as of version 10.14 (Mojave).
So in general, Swing has font rendering like Windows, JavaFX has font rendering like macOS, and neither of them have font rendering like Linux. People generally prefer what they're used to seeing on their operating system.[1]
In fact, people who encounter the "blurry" fonts of JavaFX often think it's a bug.[2][3] Real font bugs then get lost for years in the noise over the hinting debate.[4][5]
Font issues like this are important enough for JetBrains to patch the Java runtime with their own opinion on the matter.[6] Font rendering is not a minor detail for an IDE like NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA.
John [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid/ [2]: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8131923 [3]: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8139662 [4]: https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/issues/229 [5]: https://github.com/jgneff/openjdk-freetype [6]: https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@netbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@netbeans.apache.org For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists
