Google and Adobe team up to improve fonts on iOS and Linux

http://www.zdnet.com/google-and-adobe-team-up-to-improve-ios-linux-fonts-7000014803/

by microwise • 13 years ago

98 76 13 years ago

joosters2• 13 years ago

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... and is much better.

mpyne• 13 years ago

I'm glad you linked that because the second example, not shown at the ZDNet article, is actually a much better demonstration of improvement IMO.

xfs• 13 years ago

Adobe's post http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2013/05/adobe-contribute...

sp3323• 13 years ago

The "responsive" design of the page might shrink the image down if your window is too narrow. Here's a direct link to the image on the page: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/014803/freetype-... which looks fine, I think.

joosters2• 13 years ago

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_dino3• 13 years ago

> 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).

wereHamster2• 13 years ago

But finding the right patches and settings is hard.

reidrac• 13 years ago

So FreeType font hinting functionality was disabled for years because software patents held by Apple, and now Apple is using FreeType on iOS. Amazing.

I live in the EU and I've been using freetype-freeworld package for years before the patents expired. but still... amazing :)

EDIT: patents have expired

jammmuel• 13 years ago

Fuzziness is subjective. iOS uses a similar font rendering method to OS X, without subpixel rendering. See: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...

mietek2• 13 years ago

> Yes, iOS uses (parts of) FreeType.

Do you have a reference for this rather surprising claim?

mwfunk• 13 years ago

So, since you are clearly a very technically deep and insightful person with lots and lots of industry experience, you are stating with great authority that OS X does not use FreeType to rasterize fonts. Interesting. :)

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Unless you're looking at a Retina MacBook Pro, it's not really a fair comparison. Fonts look better on an iPhone simply because the pixel density is much higher than on a typical Mac screen.

thristian• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

koshak• 13 years ago

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

chrismorgan• 13 years ago

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.

ekr• 13 years ago

The article is about an upgrade to the Freetype library, more specifically to the CFF rasterizer. It has nothing to do with TrueType fonts (most of them, probably).

I've been using Arch Linux as my only OS for more than 5 years, and the only certain applications have given me font-related trouble. Firefox somehow doesn't select the correct alternative (even though fontconfig works fine).

gjulianm• 13 years ago

Although I haven't tried 13.04 yet, Qt apps on Ubuntu weren't that great on font rendering. There's room for improvement there.

Also, take into account that Linux is not Ubuntu. It's a growing trend to identify Linux with Ubuntu, as if other distributions (or even other desktop environments in the same Ubuntu distro) weren't to take into account. Have you seen KDE font rendering? Open a Chromium browser, navigate to some pages, it's awful.

kijin2• 13 years ago

Even among the Ubuntu variants, font rendering is only smooth in GTK-based desktop environments, i.e. GNOME/Unity and XFCE. Last time I checked, fonts looked awful in Kubuntu, especially if you opened either Firefox or LibreOffice. Lubuntu likewise looks like it received none of the font rendering improvements that Ubuntu has had by default for ages.

Of course, "awful" is subjective so you might prefer the way KDE and LXDE render fonts. But it doesn't change the fact that they're different.

kps• 13 years ago

>Also, take into account that Linux is not Ubuntu.

And that FreeType is not Linux only.

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

wfunction6• 13 years ago

I find Windows 7 the most appealing (and sharpest).

The others are just way too blurry.

Scene_Cast2• 13 years ago

For anyone wanting the Linux font rendering on Windows - check out MacType (https://code.google.com/p/mactype/). Works best on high-dpi monitors, and it's a matter of taste on low-dpi (little blurrier, but the fonts are more authentic).

frou_dh• 13 years ago

This debate is pointless because people almost always give the nod to what they're personally most accustomed to, perhaps also labelling the others as garbage for good measure.

Legion• 13 years ago

Ubuntu's patches for the various font rendering technologies are my #1 must-have software on Linux. Any distro I use is either a Ubuntu or something that has these patches an easy install away. (Arch has them in the AUR, for example)

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

This has, honestly, been a blind spot of mine and something that has kept me in Ubuntu rather than Arch or Debian. Can you elaborate on what the patches are called and how to replicate Ubuntu's rendering in Arch? Thanks so much.

wfunction6• 13 years ago

> 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.

Weird, I would consider that Windows has the best font rendering. Do you have any example photos you'd like to show?

A comment below [1] has some pictures, do you really find Windows's rendering to be bad?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644228

shardling• 13 years ago

I remember reading that people get very used/comfortable to Mac vs. Windows style of font rendering, and tend to perceive the other as inferior.

stephen_g2• 13 years ago

I used to like Windows' font rendering (when they introduced ClearType), but after having to Mac OS X about five years ago and using an iPhone and iPad for a couple of years I'm so used to Apple's font rendering that Windows looks really ugly to me... Quite subjective though.

Perhaps it's partially due to the fact that Mac laptops and iDevices have higher quality displays than typical Windows machines?

wisty• 13 years ago

Yes, this classic flame war. There used to be a Windows vs OSX font rendering flame war every week on HN, in the good old days.

OSX uses antialiasing, which means the fonts have a nice shape, but they are fuzzy, blurry, and to some users headache-inducing.

Windows reshapes the fonts so they fit perfectly in the pixel grid, but the shape is not what will be printed, and it looks ugly to some users.

Because people like what they are used to, and because Apple vs Microsoft is already a flame war, no-one can really agree.

dmxt• 13 years ago

What kind of font rendering does Ubuntu uses? I'm on Arch and freetype-infinality rendering is incredibe eye candy.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

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

dangerlibrary• 13 years ago

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.

neovive• 13 years ago

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

codex2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

wfunction6• 13 years ago

Is it just me who finds all of them horrible?

manicbovine• 13 years ago

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

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

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

codex2• 13 years ago

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.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

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.

edandersen• 13 years ago

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.

Google and Adobe team up to improve fonts on iOS and Linux

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