Hi,
I really like the way new experimental branch looks on high dpi monitors - font rendering is very sharp and clean. However when I try experimental branch on monitor with standard resolution (full hd), I find font rendering blurry and harder to read than before… Therefore I just wanted to ask if this will change in later builds / or if there is some “hack” to get cleaner font rendering on standard monitors?
I am attaching video for better quality - just change the extension to 7z (zip was too large to upload, 7z was much smaller but rejected as attachment). new_fonts.dmp (1.5 MB)
Bump…
I have a hard time reading UI text in new experimental branch on standard full HD monitors. Please is this going to get better in later experimental versions, or is there something I can do at the moment in order to improve font rendering? I loved the way official branch looked on full HD monitors - fonts were very crisp and easy to read. I hope there will be a way to keep such clean font rendering even in new versions…
I am sorry to bump this again, but it is really bugging me each time I open experimental version
I am not sure whether I will have to jump on a high dpi train and change all monitors (which isn’t something I would prefer), or there is a chance font rendering on standard monitors might get better in later experimental builds? Thanks.
Thanks for your patience, I have had this thread open for a week and haven’t been able to reply. We had very long discussions about this during development last year, the fact we used bitmap fonts before offered some benefits for very tiny fonts, but it is a dead end for us for future UI development. Maintaining 2 UIs is not possible as we are using new tools that do not offer both rendering methods. So in short, we will not be going back to bitmap font rendering of the old branches. We still have a few things to research and try to hopefully improve things a bit on standard DPI monitors. But just to be clear, our targets of comparision are built-in Windows apps, Houdini, Blender, etc which also use subpixel rendered text, so the end goal is to be inline with other available apps today and not to replicate the bitmaps of yesteryear.
Thank you very much for reply and information Ben. Now I completely understand the choice of subpixel font rendering.
This is really just a subjective comparison, but having mentioned Houdini and Blender, I have always thought they have “blurrier” font rendering when compared to 2021 and older versions of Touchdesigner (when talking about standard displays). This was kind of obvious due to benefits of bitmap font rendering you have mentioned.
However when I jump these days from Blender or Houdini into Touchdesigner 2022, I kind of feel like Touchdesigner is now “blurrier” than these two. I could be wrong, but that was my feeling when I have worked with those programs. It is hard to somehow objectively compare as the fonts and sizes are different, but this was my overall feeling.
thanks for explaining that @ben, that makes sense.
Just like @monty_python I was also wondering why UI text appeared so antialiased / blurry.
The effect is quite noticeable on my 34" 3440x1440 monitors (~110 PPI).
As I don’t see all my monitors being replaced very soon , I’m hoping you guys can find a way to tune down the anti alias/blurry effect for monitors with similar pixel density.
I fully realize I have reached the age for reading glasses , but for instance to me the main menu items “WIKI FORUM TUTORIALS” look quite fuzzy compared to fonts in other apps on my machine:
Just dropping a note here to let everyone know we are still working on a few angles here to improve this on loDPI monitors. However, there isn’t a quick and simple fix (we can’t just switch back to bitmap right now) so I wanted to let you know the next few builds we release will be the same. Thanks for your patience.
, I’m hoping you guys can find a way to tune down the anti alias/blurry effect for monitors with similar pixel density.
, but for instance to me the main menu items “WIKI FORUM TUTORIALS” look quite fuzzy compared to fonts in other apps on my machine: