Re: Is font rendering sharper under Wayland?

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Donnerstag, 31. Dezember 2020 05:23:53 CET Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:18:27 +0900, Tatsuyuki Ishi wrote:
> >> On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:26:43 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> >> 
> >> Surely antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary.
> > 
> > It doesn't. "Antialiasing makes hinting unnecessary" is simply wrong
> > as a general statement: hinting definitely makes a difference and
> > improves clarity at lower scaling factors like 125%. Try comparing a
> > 1px stem snapped to pixel grid and another centered on the boundary
> > of a pixel; there's no way the latter would look as sharp as the
> > former.
> 
> That sharpness comes at the expense of distortion. Hinting is all about
> hacking the shapes of glyphs to fit the pixel grid -- for example,
> getting rid of subtle curves and slants. Anti-aliasing gives you a way
> of representing these.
Yeah, but one pixel at 100% opacity looks a whole lot better than 2 pixel at 
50% opacity (or whatever opacity you get after gamma correction). So hinting 
is still important with antialiasing. It becomes less important at higher 
resolutions however. At lower resolutions there was also a bit of religious 
war between those that like sharp looks text (Linux and Microsoft), and those 
that like blurry fuzzy fonts (Apple), but it is slowly becoming less relevant 
with everybody agreeing on higher resolutions and a light vertical-only 
hinting.

'Allan