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Comment by AndriyKunitsyn | Hacker News Reader

What's funny is from 2023 (I think), macOS just draws the UI unhinted. You have a 1080p display and you don't want to see the letters in the UI blurred to death? Tough luck, 1080p is incompatible with macOS, everybody needs "retina", and nobody cares that Windows and all Linux DEs look on 1080p just fine.

It looks like this hinter will be used only in rendering PDFs, because that's where they test the performance.

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While hinting is disabled for most fonts, there are some fonts that require hinting to render correctly. We have to support hinting for those fonts, and it was easier to make it secure by rewriting hinting in Swift than it would have been to comprehensively identify every font created by those foundries.

My last 1080p monitor was around 20 years ago. I have trouble comprehending people still use them regularly.

People also use usable mice instead of touchpads, and they put the "ctrl" key where Apple thinks a useless "fn" should be. All kinds of things happen outside Apple world.

To me, it's more about what I'm used to. I have a perfectly fine several years-old monitor, so why should I throw it away?

I'm a PC user with a work MacBook. I was talking about my PC.

A very quick search yielded Dell selling 1080p laptops today:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-15-laptop/...

It is very, very common. Just not in the Mac world.

It's also the corporate standard for generic cubicle workstation monitors, though it's unusual to find a Mac in such a place anyway.

It’s very common for the people who got their last monitor 8 years ago.

It's still the most common resolution for people using desktop monitors today, according to: https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

Also for gaming too: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

1920 x 1080 51.89%

2560 x 1440 21.20%

3840 x 2160 5.00%

OS font rendering doesn't matter for gaming.

The problem is, as soon as you are not on a Mac but Linux or Windows, you are in for an awful, truly awful lot of pain. HiDPI support is a mess because even in the rare case applications are made with HiDPI in mind they are not tested on HiDPI machines.

Other way around, most Mac software is not tested how it behaves on inferior external monitors.

What kind of windows programs are these? HiDPI is more than a decade old. A desktop application, no matter what OS it is, should always be tested with different scaling factors.

Ham radio software, both open-source and commercial, is a big thing, and so is many an in-house development in many businesses.

Any particular program? GNU Radio seems perfectly fine.

Oh my sweet summer child. Even software being written TODAY isn’t being tested in HiDPI. Win32 still makes it difficult.

I’m not your child, and that’s false, it’s literally one key to change in the settings. That allows you to select the exact scaling factor, not macos’s “more text”/“less text”.

Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code? I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

Mac OS X 10.4 tried the same thing (Quartz2D scaling) and it was so damn difficult that they threw it out and went for simple 1x/2x/3x auto-scaling. Even 3x was a challenge because of pixel alignment.

Well, you were talking about testing, development of DPI-aware apps is another thing. It requires the developers to be, well, DPI-aware, but I don't think there are particular obstacles to that in winapi itself.

>Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code?

I haven't. I don't think there's any reason to, I'm more of a wxwidgets fan. I don't think even Microsoft makes applications in raw WinAPI.

>I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

The default behaviour of a DPI-unaware app in Windows is to scale everything by the scale factor. Which - yes, looks completely awful and blurry, but that's not what you describe.

I've been fine with Linux/KDE. Even the fractional scaling support is decent.

Edit: Guess it depends on the app

Then let me blow your mind:) One of my daily drivers is an ex-Chromebook at 1366x768. Granted, it's also physically smallish so the DPI isn't quite as low as a macbook would be with those pixels, but still. And that's a touch cramped but it's fine.

I'm reading on that resolution right now! MacBook Air 11" running Linux that I use as a quick hacking/reading machine in bed.

macOS has been drawing unhinted text for an eternity, and for those who can tolerate it on low-DPI screens, it's a great thing: the letter shapes look the same at all sizes, and the spacing between letters is consistent at all sizes.

I'm a high DPI snob so I haven't used a low res monitor for work in forever, but isn't the entire point of font hinting to make the text more legible at smaller pixel grid sizes? Yes, of course the shapes are more consistent since the hinter isn't touching them, but isn't the end result just less legible text?

Hinting purposefully destroys letter shapes in exchange for crispness. People who like macOS style font rendering prioritize letter shapes faithful to the font designer more than crispness.

Whether good letter shapes is more legible or crisper text is more legible is basically subjective. In the 2000s before HiDPI became popular different people really thought one was more legible than the other and vice versa. HiDPI made this basically moot.

Retina displays were introduced more than a decade ago. Why should Apple still support outdated technology after such a long time?

If you work with text and fine UI elements, do yourself a favour and get proper tools for the job. Get an ergonomic mouse and a good keyboard while you're at it. In every other field professionals use high quality tools to do their jobs, IT shouldn't be any different.

A plumber has equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars, while IT professionals think it's outrageous to pay a few hundred for equipment which is undeniably an improvement.

I had this problem on the first Apple Silicon Mac Mini in 2020 so it's at least a little older than 2023.

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