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drawing a black (000000) letter on a white (FFFFFF) background, if a pixel ideally should be half filled (perhaps by a diagonal line from corner to corner) it is drawn 50% gray (BCBCBC). Over-simple application of this procedure can produce blurry glyphs. For example, if the letter includes a vertical line that should be one pixel wide but falls exactly between two pixels, it appears on screen as a two-pixel-wide gray line. This blurriness trades clarity for accuracy. However, modern systems often force lines to fall within integral pixel coordinates, which makes glyphs look sharper, but also makes lines slightly wider or thinner than they would have looked on a printed sheet of paper.
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180:(and more popularly "black and white") rendering because no intermediate shades (of gray) are used to draw the glyphs. (In fact, any two colors can be used as foreground and background.) This form of rendering is also called aliased or "jagged". This is the fastest rendering method in the sense that it requires the least computational effort. However, it has the disadvantage that rendered glyphs may lose definition and become hard to recognize at small sizes. Therefore, many font data files (such as TrueType) contain
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335:'s intent of hinting and closer to the original outline. The result is that the on-screen display looks extremely similar to printed output, but can occasionally be difficult to read at smaller point sizes. The Quartz renderer has, since macOS Mojave, removed subpixel rendering, relying purely on greyscale anti-aliasing instead. This change is acceptable to HiDPI "retina" screens, but makes text on external monitors harder to read.
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Most computer displays have pixels made up of multiple subpixels (typically one each for red, green, and blue, which are combined to produce the full range of colours). In some cases, particularly with flat panel displays, it is possible to exploit this by rendering at the subpixel resolution rather
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A more complicated approach is to use standard anti-aliasing techniques from computer graphics. This can be thought of as determining, for each pixel at the edges of the character, how much of that pixel the character occupies, and drawing that pixel with that degree of opacity. For example, when
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library, which depending on the settings, can fall anywhere between
Microsoft's and Apple's implementations; it supports hinting and anti-aliasing, and optionally performs subpixel rendering and positioning. FreeType also offers some features not present in either implementation such as
317:'s intent of the gasp table, it becomes easier to read on the screen, but may appear somewhat different when printed. This has changed with Direct2D/DirectWrite shipping on Windows 7 and Windows Vista platform update, allowing subpixel text positioning to 1/16 pixel sizes.
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that help the rasterizer decide where to render pixels for particularly troublesome areas in the glyphs, or sets of hand-tweaked bitmaps to use at specific pixel sizes. As a prototypical example, all versions of
295:, or may be added later. In principle, each application may use a different font rasterization library, but in practice most systems attempt to standardize on a single library.
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is distinguished by the use of subpixel positioning; it does not force glyphs into exact pixel locations, instead using various antialiasing techniques, including
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Especially for small font sizes, rendering of vectorized fonts in "thumbnail" view can vary significantly with thumbnail size. Here, a small change in the
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354:) occasionally use their own font renderer. Video games and other 3D applications may also need faster, GPU-based renderers such as various
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results in significant and mutually distinct rendering anomalies, possibly due to rounding errors resulting from use of integer font sizes.
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The simplest form of rasterization is simple line-drawing with no anti-aliasing of any kind. In
Microsoft's terminology, this is called
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Rasterization with anti-aliasing with hinting. Here pixels are forced to fall into integral pixel coordinates whenever possible.
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than using whole pixels, which can increase the effective resolution of the screen. This is generally known as
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Detail of subpixel rendering, showing positions of individual color pixels that make up white font
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439:"MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-retina displays blurry | Hacker News"
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Applications may also bring their own font rendering solutions. Graphics frameworks like
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Rasterization with hinting and subpixel rendering for an RGB flat panel display
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on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read. It may also involve
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common to many applications. Such a shared library may be built into the
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MSDN Library : .NET Development : WPF : ClearType
Overview
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CS 354 Computer
Graphics — path rendering; University of Texas at Austin
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In modern operating systems, rasterization is normally provided by a
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color-balanced subpixel rendering and gamma correction.
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421:"[ft] Fwd: Re: Texts Rasterization Exposures"
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About Text
Rendering in Windows Internet Explorer 9
49:. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
197:) only provided this type of built-in rasterizer.
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223:Rasterization with anti-aliasing without hinting
148:description (as found in scalable fonts such as
16:Process of converting text from vector to raster
496:The Raster Tragedy at Low-Resolution Revisited
1469:Intellectual property protection of typefaces
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383:Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7
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211:Simple rasterization without anti-aliasing
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144:is the process of converting text from a
109:Learn how and when to remove this message
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301:has supported subpixel rendering since
160:description. This often involves some
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512:The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing
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377:Greg Hitchcock (with introduction by
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47:adding citations to reliable sources
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1464:History of Western typography
507:Texts Rasterization Exposures
475:"Slug Font Rendering Library"
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358:-based renderers and "Slug".
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564:Canons of page construction
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172:Types of rasterization
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1349:Typographic features
443:news.ycombinator.com
348:Skia Graphics Engine
58:"Font rasterization"
43:improve this article
1474:Technical lettering
1373:Typography in other
1114:Hanging punctuation
293:desktop environment
1534:Digital typography
1437:Handwriting script
1364:Desktop publishing
1334:Character encoding
1327:Digital typography
841:Horizontal aspects
794:Visual distinction
652:Widows and orphans
329:subpixel rendering
269:subpixel rendering
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142:Font rasterization
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162:anti-aliasing
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99:November 2009
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60: –
59:
55:
54:Find sources:
48:
44:
38:
37:
32:This article
30:
26:
21:
20:
1459:Type foundry
1343:
1296:Metric units
1226:Punchcutting
1211:Movable type
1181:Font catalog
1141:Vertical bar
878:Word spacing
848:Figure space
731:Text figures
574:Even working
478:
469:
461:freetype.org
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41:Please help
36:verification
33:
1454:Type design
1449:Style guide
1442:Calligraphy
1432:Handwriting
1246:Type design
1196:Lorem ipsum
1191:Letterpress
1151:Typesetting
1091:Punctuation
1055:Record type
1026:Gaelic type
1014:Schwabacher
904:Body height
769:Letter case
637:Line length
195:Windows 3.1
1427:Penmanship
1399:East Asian
1241:Type color
1174:monospaced
1131:Interpunct
1124:minus sign
1048:Specialist
984:Sans-serif
977:slab serif
954:Roman type
909:Cap height
873:Thin space
832:Whitespace
784:Title case
779:Snake case
774:Small caps
759:Camel case
691:Diacritics
599:Pull quote
594:Pagination
589:Paper size
548:Typography
362:References
303:Windows XP
191:Windows 95
69:newspapers
924:Overshoot
919:Mean line
914:Descender
827:Underline
669:Character
647:Runaround
627:Alignment
619:Paragraph
350:(used by
273:ClearType
189:prior to
1528:Category
1513:Category
1392:PT Fonts
1387:Cyrillic
1251:Typeface
1169:computer
1070:fat face
943:Typeface
929:x-height
899:Baseline
894:Ascender
754:All caps
716:Rotation
711:Ligature
706:Ink trap
340:FreeType
321:Mac OS X
178:bi-level
127:upright=
1339:Hinting
1216:Pangram
1034:Insular
1007:Rotunda
1002:Fraktur
967:Antiqua
853:Kerning
822:Oblique
817:Italics
764:Initial
696:Dingbat
686:Counter
632:Leading
291:or the
166:hinting
152:) to a
83:scholar
1382:Arabic
1281:Cicero
1119:Hyphen
1104:Bullet
1065:script
1039:Uncial
972:Didone
736:Tittle
579:Margin
569:Column
325:Quartz
193:(e.g.
158:bitmap
154:raster
146:vector
85:
78:
71:
64:
56:
1306:Point
1276:Agate
1136:Space
962:Serif
863:Pitch
726:Swash
701:Glyph
642:River
182:hints
90:JSTOR
76:books
1404:Thai
1318:Twip
1301:Pica
1256:list
1236:Sort
1164:Font
1109:Dash
1095:List
807:Bold
657:runt
556:Page
135:1.75
131:1.70
62:news
381:) "
356:SDF
323:'s
156:or
133:to
45:by
1530::
1291:En
1286:Em
477:.
459:.
441:.
423:.
390:^
370:^
275:.
1097:)
1093:(
540:e
533:t
526:v
481:.
463:.
445:.
427:.
112:)
106:(
101:)
97:(
87:·
80:·
73:·
66:·
39:.
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