
Google and Adobe team up to improve fonts on iOS and Linux - microwise
http://www.zdnet.com/google-and-adobe-team-up-to-improve-ios-linux-fonts-7000014803/
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joosters
The article's font sample image is pretty shoddy. They've resized it and so
lost all the features of the renderer! To my eyes, the top example seems
clearer and sharper than the bottom one.

The original image is found at [http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/got-cff.htm...](http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/got-cff.html) and is much better.

~~~
xfs
Adobe's post [http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2013/05/adobe-
contribute...](http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2013/05/adobe-contributes-
cff-rasterizer-to-freetype.html)

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chrismorgan
Seriously? Ubuntu has the best font rendering of any operating system that
I've used.

Mac OS X is perfectly good, but it doesn't tend to feel as nice as Ubuntu.
Especially when you get to things like Indic scripts.

Windows' font rendering (I can only speak for up to Windows 7) is still quite
nasty, especially at larger font sizes. The lack of vertical antialiasing
ruins it for these cases.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Agreed. I made this in the past:

<http://i.imgur.com/4dGbR.png> (Ubuntu)

<http://i.imgur.com/mfyjw.png> (OS X)

<http://i.imgur.com/BqOdg.png> (Windows 7)

~~~
acdha
Interesting: in terms of visual quality, I would rank those in order of
decreasing preference as OS X, Windows 7, Ubuntu.

~~~
rlanday
Is Windows even using the same font? I think Windows prioritizes making the
text look sharp over getting all the character strokes in the right place. OS
X and Ubuntu look very similar except for the line spacing, and the lowercase
‘a’, which looks kind of strange/vertically compressed on Ubuntu.

~~~
drivebyacct2
They should all be using Verdana, as per HN's CSS. I have the font installed
in each OS so it should be a fair fight unless I screwed something different
up.

~~~
velodrome
The font in the Ubuntu image is not Verdana.

Ubuntu does not install Microsoft fonts by default. It will fallback to
Ubuntu's default font.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I _always_ have msttcorefonts installed which includes Verdana. It's part of
the script that is the first thing I run on a new install...

(Like, a half hour ago, I checked that Verdana was installed and then
recreated the screenshot from the original post and it's identical as far as I
can tell.

~~~
sp332
The fonts are similar, but you can see the numeral "3" is different. They're
not the same font.

Right-click the text and choose "Inspect element". In the right-hand column,
make sure "Computed" is selected at the top, then look to see what font-family
is being rendered. (If you click "Rules" at the top, you can see which rules
are active.)

~~~
drivebyacct2
Yeah, it says Verdana: <http://i.imgur.com/50Sx6c3.png>

The '3' doesn't look any more different than other chars due to rendering
difference, to me.

And KDE's font manager's take on Verdana: <http://i.imgur.com/4c5cSe3.png>

And Firefox on my system, just as a reference:
<http://i.imgur.com/a2yZ7UQ.png>

~~~
sp332
Thanks for double-checking. The 'a' looks very different on the Windows 7
sample!

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codex
It's been my experience that Ubuntu's default font rendering is good--but this
seems to be because Ubuntu is using fonts which have been explicitly designed
to render well in the Linux font stack. I find that using mainstream TTF and
OTF fonts, with their custom hinting and ligatures, works less well.

Soon this will be a non-issue, though. Font engines differ only in how they
hint and subpixel render at low resolutions. Once every display is "retina,"
there will be very little difference, except perhaps in gamma correction,
advanced kerning and layout algorithms, where I've found OS X has always
produced superior results.

~~~
jmhain
I really don't know much about font rendering, but I thought that was the case
too so I installed the Ubuntu fonts on my Arch Linux system, and they looked
terrible. According to the Arch wiki, Ubuntu applies their own patches and
"extra configurations" for freetype2, cairo, etc. I was able to achieve a
similar, but not quite as pleasing result by installing freetype2-infinality
on Arch.

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codex
Now that font rendering technology on displays has reached that of print
thanks to "retina" class displays, how can we improve readability even
further? We're no longer constrained by the limitations of the printing press.

What if every vowel in a word were rendered in light grey, and every consonant
in black? Or every letter were mapped to one of n subtle (near black) color
hues? Or both? Such crazy schemes might further improve word recognition and
reduce load on the visual cortex. Perhaps the Kindle, Readability, or iBooks
could implement something like this as an experiment. I'd definitely try it.

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kmfrk
You can support the development and maintenance of this project by donating
here: <http://pledgie.com/campaigns/18808>.

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dangerlibrary
The rendering of curved lines appears much better, but vertical and horizontal
lines are very poorly rendered. You can see this clearly in the Chinese
character "中" - the first character inside the parentheses on the first line.

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joosters
Is it true that iOS uses a different font renderer than Mac OS? I thought that
the fonts on an iPhone looked pretty good actually. Perhaps they are referring
to apps that decide to use the FreeType renderer?

~~~
happy_dino
> Is it true that iOS uses a different font renderer than Mac OS?

Yes, iOS uses (parts of) FreeType. Imagine the shitstorm if they shipped their
fuzzy, washed-out default rendering! The issue is that most people buying
smartphones are not die-hard Apple fans like the buyers of their other
offerings, so the font rentering would be pretty hard to sell.

> I thought that the fonts on an iPhone looked pretty good actually.

That's because FreeType (with the right patches and settings) is already
pretty much the best font renderer (with a few exceptions).

~~~
wereHamster
But finding the right patches and settings is hard.

~~~
gillianseed
Doesn't Ubuntu and other out-of-the-box desktop friendly distros come with
good font settings from the get go?

I use Arch Linux but even here it's not much of a hassle given that there is a
very informative wiki page not to mention packages with good configuration
presets (infinality).

~~~
happy_dino
> Doesn't Ubuntu and other out-of-the-box desktop friendly distros come with
> good font settings from the get go?

Yes, exactly!

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manicbovine
A good start would be to replace fontconfig and its ridiculous XML files.

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neovive
I hope this brings more consistency to font rendering across OS environments.
That would be a great accomplishment and wonderful for web designers!

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wfunction
Is it just me who finds _all_ of them horrible?

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jamesaguilar
I would love to try this out and even went to the distance of downloading the
tarball for the beta of '.12. However, it's not clear _where_ the property
needs to be set, as there are a few places in the library where FT_Init... is
called. On top of that, I am not sure from re-reading this that it helps at
all for TT fonts, which is most of what I end up using.

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thristian
So, does this mean that text on web-pages is going to have inconsistent
rasterisation depending on whether the font happens to represent its glyphs
with TrueType, PostScript, or CFF outlines?

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is not any different than today (in terms of this problem) as far as I
can tell. One part of creating the whole system is creating a unified font
catalog in _one_ font format.

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edandersen
How about Google spend some time fixing font rendering in Chrome on Windows?
Firefox has nailed it but Chrome hasn't. Some web fonts are unreadable.

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koshak
so, does it mean freetype and fontconfig will render fonts pretty well without
patching them with infinality for example?

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drivebyacct2
Anyone want to host a PPA for Raring with the patched freetype?

