Bas Schouten - Latest Comments on Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Piotr Grochowski [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 16:10:08 +0000

“Could be wrong, but it looks to me like the text rendered on the right was blended in a non-linear color space (e.g., SRGB) while the DirectWrite is probably correctly blended in linear RGB.”

Actually it is pretty much the other way around. While ClearType GDI is by default incorrect gamma, it can be fixed by disabling ClearType (making for a grayscale mode that’s always gamma-correct) or by selecting the gamma-correct picture in the ClearType Tuner (https://fontgammatest.netlify.com/cleartypeGDI-gamma.PNG). On the other hand, DirectWrite is not actually gamma correct, it always produces way too dark anti-aliasing shades for black on white text no matter what is done.

Rash [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:58:43 +0000

I have to agree with the others here, Bas, but don’t take it personally, it is not your fault. The same lighter, noisier and a lot less smooth (imho) fonts are also visible on IE9. It is almost as if Microsoft is purposely going the opposite direction of Apple, that makes fonts look VERY smooth (they look like they’re all in bold). But as boring as MacOS font rendering is for some people (not for me), it is infinite times more readable than DirectWrite + D2D.

As far as ClearType I must say I love it. Calibri and Consolas both look absolutely amazing with it. I don’t see any colorization or any distracting effect on them. Personally I even prefer that combination over any MacOS font rendering.

By the way, the D2D font rendering improves a lot if you increase the size of the font. So whenever I am stuck with it (like in Firefox) I zoom in on almost every page. I can’t do that with the UI which I must admit looks absolutely horrible.

hitS [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:27:20 +0000

DirectWrite is a bunch of crap. Texts in Firefox 4 (rendered using DWrite) are unreadable. Can’t remember, when, for the last time, I was so angry.

Collin [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:59:58 +0000

“arguably” does not perform better ?

How can it be argued? It’s lighter, fuzzier, doesn’t match the rest of the OS, and is flat out less readable than GDI.

I mean, I guess as long as the option to disable hardware accel remains it won’t be a big deal, but it seems like a shame to lose hardware accel and its associated benefits because the font rendering looks awful…

Blisset [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:58:28 +0000

DirectWrite font rendering are ugly (too kerned!!), GDI fonts are much better!

How can I decrease the font kerning but keeping DirectWrite enabled for higher performance graphics?

Thank you

Jonas [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:14:37 +0000

Not just UI text, but also text using the similar font size as UI text, which is pretty much all flowing text in, uh, blogs like this one and a whole lot of other places.

Brad [Visitor] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Fri, 28 May 2010 18:54:18 +0000

I also have to notice that GDI-rendered text simply looks better and more readable than DirectText-rendered text, which looks thin (especially the curves) and appears to contain slight noise. I hope they improve font rendering in IE9, because if it stays like this, I’m going elsewhere.

revian [Member] in response to: Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:06:29 +0000

Lack of updates this week is because I’m at the all hands meeting of Mozilla :-). We have had a lot of good progress surrounding direct2d things as well though!