Poor quality font rendering

[Felipe Heidrich]

Hi John T.

In JFX we use DirectWrite to produce glyph images, which I believe it what IE10 uses (once upon the time I heard that Word used Uniscribe, which is a different MS library for text. Nowadays, I have no clue).

Although we use the same base library it is possible to have differences caused by:
a) we are still using our shader program to produce sub-pixel positioned glyphs (LCD).
b) using different values for gamma correction (unlikely)

But these problems would only cause very very subtle differences in the rendering (I think), and with a bit more time I should be able to fix both.

Could you please provide a picture of exact case you are seeing (maybe file a jira) ?

Thank  you
Felipe



On Aug 21, 2013, at 5:53 AM, John C. Turnbull wrote:

> I have only really tested JavaFX extensively on Windows so my comments here
> apply mainly to that platform.
> 
> 
> 
> It seems that even with a font smoothing type of LCD, font rendering in
> JavaFX is not at the same level of quality of native applications.  My
> current experiences are with JavaFX 8 b103 and I find that all rendered text
> in JavaFX appears of a significantly poorer quality than that which I would
> see in Word for example or even in IE10 (which I believe uses the same text
> rendering engine).  Also, these observations are based on text in "standard"
> controls and the quality of font rendering is dramatically worse within the
> Canvas control.
> 
> 
> 
> I am not an expert in font technology but I have read many times that the
> levels of antialiasing for text that can be achieved in a GPU-based renderer
> are always going to be less than that achieved in a CPU-based renderer.
> This is often explained on the basis of graphics card drivers being
> optimised for performance and the rapid rendering of triangles commonly
> required in games rather than for rendering quality when it comes to text.
> 
> 
> 
> Is this the reason why JavaFX font rendering appears less legible and of a
> lower quality than native apps?
> 
> If so, how does IE10 for example achieve a higher quality of rendering when
> it seems to also use DirectWrite?
> 
> Is the quality of JavaFX font rendering ever going to improve?
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> 
> -jct
>