I've sent this one a couple of days ago, and looks like it fell through the moderation cracks since it had an image attached to it. So sending this again...
So I spent some time today looking into font rendering on the latest macOS 10.14 (Mojave), I came across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873 that says that it has removed the subpixel anti-aliasing setting. There's a new one under "General" named "Use font smoothing when available". When that setting is on (which is by default), font rendering in Swing with the recommended awt.font.desktophints system property is too heavy. Looking at how https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/master/platform/editor-ui-api/src/com/intellij/ide/ui/UISettings.kt is doing it (lines 399-420) it appears that they are setting KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING to VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_OFF, and doing that in Swing results in font rendering that is consistent with native apps. Then I looked at how JavaFX font rendering looks like with locally built https://github.com/gluonhq/gluon-samples/tree/master/fifty-states No matter if that new platform setting is off or on, all the texts look halo'd - zoom in on https://www.pushing-pixels.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/javafx-mojave.png and see all those pink / light blue pixels around glyphs. Am I running the demo wrong?
