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The sad state of font rendering on Linux (2018)
Preamble As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic. If you don’t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost.
An overwhelming majority of legacy software has 96 DPI hardcoded into it Software maintainers didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96, because the costs are high and incentives are nil In the case of mixed use of HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays, you need to somehow scale the entire UI back-and-forth when moved between displays, which introduces more hacks and corner cases where end result is more suboptimal than before Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did, so: Majority of screens currently in use are non-HiDPI, meaning you are almost guaranteed to run into the mixed DPI use case Majority of screens currently in use will not be upgraded to HiDPI until they break or corporate hardware upgrade cycles kick in, because majority of the market share is covered by Microsoft’s approach, which doesn’t need HiDPI to produce easily readable text Majority of screens currently in use will not be upgraded to HiDPI even when they get replaced, because HiDPI costs extra for no obvious benefit to your average consumer or corporation You can read more about the patents in David Turner’s blog post, but I haven’t noticed any impact of table validation code on the fonts that I see every day. If you are coming from the Windows world, a lot of websites will look weird to you and page rendering may be downright broken if the fonts are missing from your system, e.g. plain text files opened in Chrome will have overlapping lines.
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