Text rendering

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi

After I found out that the new version of Juce ( 3.0.0 ) has a new text rendering engine I immediatly tried it on windows. I have to admit that I was not really impressed by the new results. I'm using fairly small standard fonts ( Arial, 12 ). The font rendering still looks a lot different from the native windows rendering ( compared to for example WordPad ).

On the forum -a lot- of topics are about text rendering some dating a few years back. I find it very difficult to find out which is true and which not anymore ( Jules: is it possible to have an advanced search on date, or version of juce ? )

Back to text rendering:

- What are the expected results on windows 7 ? ( can anyone show their best rendering for smaller font size in a picture ? )

- What control do I have on the quality of the rendering ( on windows ) ?

- What fonts did you ( = Jules ) use to optimize the new text rendering ?

 

I have to add that rendering on OSX is perfect.

 

Jankoen

 

 

2

There isn't a new rendering engine. I just tweaked the gamma a bit.

And yes, it looks different from the standard Windows rendering - that's deliberate. That standard Windows renderer was always horrifically over-hinted and didn't do sub-pixel horizontal positioning, which is why I opted for rendering without any hinting. The OSX renderer has always been superb (because it uses vertical but not horizontal hinting), which is why I've used that on that platform.

TBH they might have finally improved it in Windows 8 / DirectWrite, I've not checked. If so I may at some point migrate to that, but it's not trivial to do.

3

About the changes in juce 3, i did understand that incorrectly.

Attached you find a screenshot, can you confirm that the results are correct, or is there something I'm missing ?

I use Arial 12 pixels most of the time

 

4

Considering that your font is far too small for use on a GUI (IMHO), I think it looks fine.

Even the best rendering engines like OSX would only do marginally better at that kind of size. I assume you come from a Windows background and are used to seeing the horrible old-fashioned heavily-aliased text that Windows uses for small sizes..? I've no interest in supporting that kind of thing - I agree with OSX/Adobe/etc that in rendering text, sub-pixel kerning is more important than aliasing, as it produces a more balanced overall line shape. And now, I'm sick of defending myself on this topic yet again, so that's my last word on the matter!

5

Hee Jules

I was not at all on the road to put you in a defending position. I'm trying to find out what I can do to achive the optimal results.

My problem is this: I have a plugin designed on OSX which looks unclear on windows. I need to improve that.

But anyway, you helped me forward, thanks for that.

Jankoen

 

 

6

Sorry, I've just had this same discussion sooo many times before, normally with people much more argumentative than you!