[arch-general] Subpixel antialiasing

[Robbie Smith]

> > 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.

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 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.
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