Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 14, 2018 7:49 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: Liberation fonts: hinting needed by mirabilos
Parent article: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Those screen have ridiculously low DPIs, I wouldn't expect any contemporary display techniques to look reasonable at them.

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 14, 2018 13:52 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (5 responses)

Why?

I mean, really. There’s no reason to make it look any worse on them than necessary. There’s especially no reason why any “contemporary” display stuff should look worse than older stuff.

And it isn’t. It’s just that, with these resolutions, you have to think about what your eyes want a bit more. With higher dpi, you get away doing less (e.g. subpixel hinting is completely no longer necessary there), that’s all.

(Higher dpi breaks my bitmap terminal font though, so I avoid those, in order to let the letters stay big enough.)

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 14, 2018 15:19 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (4 responses)

Why? Because that ancient stuff. Common case is much higher DPI. Not HiDPI though, this is still a minority.
Optimizing for common case is what is happening. You still have knobs to cater your exotic hardware – like you found, grayscale works better than subpixel. But don't expect optimizations, or even defaults working best for your hardware. 15 years ago it would be reasonable, not now.

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 14, 2018 23:27 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (3 responses)

Why?

This is not Microsoft (who have contracts with hardware companies) or Apple (who are a hardware company).

There’s no reason to support older hardware less well than newer, within its capabilities. None *at all*, period.

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 15, 2018 7:33 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)

When supporting old stuff collides with properly supporting current stuff, it is a reason. Default settings are for current, widely used hardware.
Older hardware is supported by providing settings you need to change if you decide not to use current, widely used hardware.

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 15, 2018 15:58 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

What, you mean like normal desktop screens? HiDPI desktop monitors are still rare and expensive.

Liberation fonts: hinting needed

Posted Nov 15, 2018 16:41 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

No, I mean pitiful screens with DPI around 70. Normal screens have around 120 DPI currently. This is not HiDPI. HiDPI is still an outlier, sadly.
But wait another 10 years and HiDPI will be standard.