Re: Poor quality font rendering

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:01:50 -0700 

On 22/08/2013 21:24, Scott Palmer wrote:

I just tried turning off ClearType on Windows and found that the result was
pretty ugly.  I assume that with ClearType turned off, the results should
be comparable to what JavaFX is producing with grey-scale smoothing.
It depends on how you did it, if you turned it fully off it may not even do grayscale smoothing... also the default font in Windows is not suitable for this. See below. 

I noticed that the same web page rendered text differently between Chrome
and Firefox - Firefox seemed to have darker text. So even among native apps
you can get different results for the same font.



If you want to turn off cleartype in Windows 7, then just turning it off 
is not sufficient.  You need to replace the default font with Tahoma as 
well as the Windows 7 default font (Segoe UI) sucks without LCD 
smoothing.  I can recommend the cleartype switch program, see here: 
http://karpolan.com/software/cleartype-switch/


You'll want to keep smooth edges on, but cleartype off.



Scott


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Phil Race<[email protected]>  wrote:


John T,

Per a couple of earlier emails in this thread John H is deliberately
disabling LCD text
so has grey scale, hence you can't compare directly with a native app
since they all use LCD.

Any comparison has to be
1. Using the same string
2. Rendered in the same fashion : LCD or greyscale, hinted/unhinted.
3. Using the same font (face, size etc)
4. Using the same colours (fg&bg) and watch out for the UI controls - they
used
to tweak your text colour so that (eg) black became dark grey, reducing
contrast
which reduced legibility, thus also invalidating any  test. I am not sure
if this is still the case,
but contrast is very important for text and you should make sure its as
high as possible.

-phil.




On 8/22/2013 11:35 AM, John C. Turnbull wrote:


Am I the only one who looks at that screenshot and thinks that the fonts
look really bad and obviously different from a native app?  Its not just
the Plot section, its all text on the screen.

This is what I am talking about.  I wouldn't even describe the
differences as "subtle" as to me there is a dramatic difference in quality.

Can this be fixed or are JavaFX apps always going to stand out for all
the wrong reasons like this?

On 23/08/2013, at 0:05, John Hendrikx<[email protected]>  wrote:

  Those are all normal controls, the plot section is just a Label for

example.

On 22/08/2013 13:39, John C. Turnbull wrote:


John H, it may be just me but pretty much *all* the fonts in your
screenshot
look quite poor and noticeably different from native font rendering.
  If you
look for instance at the text in the "Plot" section, to me that text
looks
awful.

Is that inside a WebView or some other control?

-jct

-----Original Message-----
From: 
openjfx-dev-bounces@openjdk.**java.net<[email protected]>
[mailto:openjfx-dev-bounces@**openjdk.java.net<[email protected]>]
On Behalf Of John Hendrikx
Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2013 17:29
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Poor quality font rendering


I took another good look, and I see what is bothering me is mostly how
the
glyph "2" is rendered on my system (it has a thick appearing curve
attached
to the base).  I've included a screenshot of my application that uses
several different sizes fonts, but it seems only the ones in the top
bar are
rendered somewhat wierd.

http://ukyo.xs4all.nl/**Digit2RenderedPoorlyInTopBar.**png<http://ukyo.xs4all.nl/Digit2RenderedPoorlyInTopBar.png>

I'm on Windows 7, JavaFX 8b99, 32-bit, using D3D pipeline (I get this
stuff
in log in an infinite loop, so must be D3D I think):

D3D Vram Pool: 129,613,674 used (48.3%), 129,613,674 managed (48.3%),
268,435,456 total                   --
com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:134)
75 total resources being
managed

-- com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:153)
4 permanent resources
(5.3%)

-- com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:154)
2 resources locked
(2.7%)

-- com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:156)
43 resources contain interesting data
(57.3%)                                                             --
com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:158)
0 resources disappeared
(0.0%)

-- com.sun.prism.impl.**ManagedResource.printSummary(**
ManagedResource.java:160)

I also have this in main, before Application.launch is called:

       System.setProperty("prism.**lcdtext", "false");

In .root in CSS I have:

     -fx-font-family: "Arial";
     -fx-font-size: 16px;
     -fx-font-weight: normal;

So all the fonts you see should be Arial (but the sizes and weights are
tweaked depending on location).

--John

On 21/08/2013 20:51, Felipe Heidrich wrote:


John H:

In JFX we decided to go with sub-pixel positioned text (as opposite to


pixel grid aligned).


That said, on Windows for grayscale text, we are not doing that (yet).
Are


you running Windows, with D3D pipeline ?


I would need to see a picture to be sure I understand the problem you


describe.


Felipe


On Aug 21, 2013, at 10:19 AM, John Hendrikx wrote:

  I think I also noticed a change in font rendering around b99

somewhere...


the fonts seem to be thinner than before, or perhaps more poorly

aligned
with pixel boundaries.  I'd prefer glyphs laid out in the same way each
time, ie. letters are always on a new pixel boundary, so the same letter
will look the same regardless of what preceeds it.  I have LCD rendering
turned off as I donot appreciate colored fringes on my glyphs.


On 21/08/2013 14:53, John C. Turnbull wrote:

I have only really tested JavaFX extensively on Windows so my
comments here apply mainly to that platform.



It seems that even with a font smoothing type of LCD, font rendering
in JavaFX is not at the same level of quality of native
applications.  My current experiences are with JavaFX 8 b103 and I
find that all rendered text in JavaFX appears of a significantly
poorer quality than that which I would see in Word for example or
even in IE10 (which I believe uses the same text rendering engine).


Also, these observations are based on text in "standard"

controls and the quality of font rendering is dramatically worse

within the Canvas control.



I am not an expert in font technology but I have read many times
that the levels of antialiasing for text that can be achieved in a
GPU-based renderer are always going to be less than that achieved in
a


CPU-based renderer.

This is often explained on the basis of graphics card drivers being

optimised for performance and the rapid rendering of triangles
commonly required in games rather than for rendering quality when it


comes to text.

Is this the reason why JavaFX font rendering appears less legible
and of a lower quality than native apps?

If so, how does IE10 for example achieve a higher quality of
rendering when it seems to also use DirectWrite?

Is the quality of JavaFX font rendering ever going to improve?



Thanks,



-jct





























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