The crisp fonts saga

[John Hendrikx]

On 14/12/2023 07:15, John Neffenger wrote:
> On 12/13/23 3:29 AM, Mark Raynsford wrote:
>
>> Can you give an example of UIs scaling unevenly, or animations looking
>> jerky? All other non-JavaFX UI applications on my system evidently use
>> hinting, and I don't see anything recognizable there.
>
> There are some text animations in JavaFX that you won't see in most 
> user interfaces: think text rotations, not stock tickers. It's 
> difficult to keep text aligned to the pixel grid when the grid is 
> rotating.

Animated text is extremely rare in productivity applications, so I think 
this really should be an option on a Node by Node basis (there is 
already the cache/cacheHint property which are animation related). A big 
wall of text (like in a rich text control, TextArea or some kind of text 
editor) shouldn't have to suffer in readability just in case we may want 
to rotate or scale it... If Browsers had the JavaFX mentality of font 
rendering, everyone would switch to the one browser that renders font 
properly -- and I can imagine poorly rendered text is one the first 
things people notice and can be a big reason for worse JavaFX adoption.

Also, if the animation is fast enough (ie,  a quick rotate / scale / 
translate transition) you won't notice any odd effects on the text 
scaling.  I can imagine it will look terrible though if you slow those 
down (ie. a transition taking a couple of seconds -- a bit unrealistic 
for a usable application though).

--John