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Comment by peetle | Hacker News Reader

This look exciting, but I am obsessed with the lack of subpixel rendering for fonts in godot (imgui, nanovg, etc). The fonts just look crummy to me.

As I understand it, subpixel rendering is a treacherous patent landscape. Is that the reason why it is consistently missing from these tools?

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It's more because it's a fairly niche technique that requires either dual-source blending or constant blend colors, things that game rendering engineers don't think about often. It's also tricky to make work with transparency, which is the reason OS X ditched it. Basically, nobody in the video games space does it frequently.

Maybe I should clean up and open-source my subpixel text renderer that uses dual-source blending....

do it man! point the godot devs to it as well :D

Subpixel text rendering also requires intimate knowledge of the display being rasterized for, and becomes a mess once you enter multiple displays with different pixel layouts. I was working on support in my font library https://github.com/mooman219/fontdue/, but it quickly becomes not worth it. I'm interested to see your approach to the problem if your project is online!

FYI, there's no subpixel rendering in macOS anymore (since 10.15).

As far as I know all Microsoft patents expired in this area.

edit: seems like it wasn't too long ago.

https://www.freetype.org/patents.html

After you see really nice fonts, and get used to them, bad ones just drive you crazy. a 1440p or 4k monitor for instance, after having one you don't want to use a 1080p monitor for text any more!

I imagine for games its partly a performance issue that they don't do fancier font rendering sometimes.

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