On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 8:21 AM, Vladimir Nikšić wrote:

Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.antialias: true Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.hinting: true Xft.hintstyle: hintslight

Cool! In my fonts.conf I also have set the autohint and lcdfilter, so it's possible (I have not tested) that you could also add these to get it a little bit better: Xft.autohint: false Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault On my laptop panels (which is LED) I also use "rgba: none" which seems (for some odd reason) to give me better smoothing of the font colors. It's very weird, though - not always. Basically they all match my .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf - I also had to reject "Caladea" and "Carlito" fonts due to really weird output in Chromium on some web pages. Here's my whole fonts.conf: http://pastebin.com/t0JN3mVq ...and my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini files that might help you: http://pastebin.com/DB3FJk2y http://pastebin.com/ehtsuaW8 hth, -te

Doesn't Chromium use its own font rendering system?

Not really. It has to do a lot of font-related work to implement the web standards but they're using freetype2/harfbuzz like everyone else.

I've noticed that on other OSes it has its own rendering style that doesn't use subpixel rendering either, so it looks different but not necessarily worse.

You're getting confused by the fact that it didn't use DirectWrite on Windows for quite some time. It *certainly* had subpixel rendering there and on the other supported platforms. Windows has both a legacy font rendering stack and a modern one with a different appearance and better performance. Many applications use the old stack but people spend a lot of time in browsers so it got noticed.

It looks fine on my Arch install, so its either respecting my font settings or the in-built rendering settings are (perhaps by coincidence) the same as my own preferences. I should point out that I always turn off subpixel rendering and use greyscale antialiasing instead, because the colour fringes on subpixel text are annoying.

I doubt you're able to notice color fringes with black-on-white or white-on-black with the lcdfilter set to lcdlight. You probably just didn't have it configured correctly (i.e. no lcdfilter).

On 28/05/15 10:22 AM, Robbie Smith wrote:

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Doesn't Chromium use its own font rendering system?

Not really. It has to do a lot of font-related work to implement the web standards but they're using freetype2/harfbuzz like everyone else.

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I've noticed that on other OSes it has its own rendering style that doesn't use subpixel rendering either, so it looks different but not necessarily worse.

You're getting confused by the fact that it didn't use DirectWrite on Windows for quite some time. It *certainly* had subpixel rendering there and on the other supported platforms.

Windows has both a legacy font rendering stack and a modern one with a different appearance and better performance. Many applications use the old stack but people spend a lot of time in browsers so it got noticed.

I installed Windows in a virtual machine last week because it saves time rebooting when I use it so infrequently, and was surprised to discover that the font rendering used in Chrome's web page display frame was greyscale and not ClearType/subpixel like the rest of Windows. I don't use Windows frequently enough to comment on whether or not this has changed.

It's not like that for everyone else. It wasn't like that before either. It used GDI instead of DirectWrite but that just made it look different than modern applications. It was hardly the only application still using GDI font rendering though.

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It looks fine on my Arch install, so its either respecting my font settings or the in-built rendering settings are (perhaps by coincidence) the same as my own preferences. I should point out that I always turn off subpixel rendering and use greyscale antialiasing instead, because the colour fringes on subpixel text are annoying.

I doubt you're able to notice color fringes with black-on-white or white-on-black with the lcdfilter set to lcdlight. You probably just didn't have it configured correctly (i.e. no lcdfilter).

I've tried various combinations of filters and settings for my font rendering, and all subpixel rendered text (even on OS X) looks slightly off; some letters have colour fringes, some letters are a slightly different colour to others, and it can be quite distracting. Maybe it's different with font hinting set to a higher value; I always opt for 'slight' or 'none' because I prefer the smoother shapes over the more pixelated look of Windows.

Using the hinting information from fonts rather than auto-hinting is important, which means using high quality fonts. Source Code Pro / Source Sans Pro / Source Serif Pro are likely the only really well hinted fonts in the repositories.