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McEs, A Hacker Life
Thursday, November 22, 2012
 High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting

What happens when an unstoppable bullet hits an impenetrable wall?

A while back I wrote a document about the interactions of high-density displays and font rendering options.  I just went ahead and made it public, so, enjoy!

High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting

Update (July 18, 2013): It was brought to my attention that the document had disappeared. I have no idea how that happened, but I've uploaded it again. It also means that the URL has changed. :(

Labels: , , ,

¶ 5:08 PM

Comments:
I am soon to be in the market for a laptop with a high-dpi screen: considering we are treating 300dpi as laser-quality printouts (or at least we did in the early 1990s :), I am a bit saddened that you didn't simply find 240dpi to look perfect with neither hinting nor subpixel text positioning.

Any screenshots included in the document don't do the actual renderings any justice since we are mostly looking at them on lowly 110dpi-140dpi screens :)

# posted by Anonymous Danilo : November 23, 2012 11:22 AM
 
Hi Danilo,
two things you have to consider: First of all also 300dpi laser prints do not look perfect for very small fonts. Current smartphones are often much closer to the viewers eyes than sheets of paper. As they have less space, some fonts are rather small.

Second (and more important): The main topic of the text is, how to enshure backwards compatiblity. This means, that your must abstract to a lower resolution than the display is capable. Now the problem is how to abstract while keeping the most advantage of the high display resolution.

To the screenshots: They might not represent a high-res screen, but in case the space distribution looks very odd, you will see this in high-res as well. Smaller offsets might be only important for purists, but if you care, they are still visible.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : November 23, 2012 6:24 PM
 
When I click the link it says:-

Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : June 23, 2013 3:13 PM
 
Ugh. I have no idea why the document has gone missing. Let me try to fix this...
# posted by Blogger behdad : June 26, 2013 3:35 PM
 
Uploaded it again here: http://goo.gl/teiOz

Will update the post.
# posted by Blogger behdad : July 18, 2013 2:59 PM
 
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