mactype

Others can fix it too and they have. See: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype https://github.com/CoolOppo/GDI-PlusPlus I use MacType and it works really well. You can tune many more things than with ClearType.

Agreed, but layouts such as Pentile don't actually have all three subpixel components in a logical pixel, so you'll still get artifacts even with grayscale AA. You can compensate for this by masking those missing components. https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

I've recently been learning about how fonts render based on subpixel layouts in monitor panels. Windows assumes that all panels use RGB layout, and their ClearType software will render fonts with that assumption in mind. Unfortunately, this leads to visible text fringing on new display types, like the alternative stripe pattern used on WOLED monitors, or the triangular pattern used on QD-OLED. Some third-party tools exist to tweak how ClearType works, like MacType[1] or Better ClearType Tuner[2]. Unfortunately, these tools don't work in Chrome/electron, which seems to implement its own font rendering. Reading this, I guess that's through FreeType. I hope that as new panel technologies start becoming more prevalent, that somebody takes the initiative to help define a standard for communicating subpixel layouts from displays to the grap

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work. This is great work btw. [0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932 [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595 [2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...

HDMI 2.0 is capable of doing 4k @ 120Hz, but only up to YCbCr 4:2:0 8bit instead of the full YCbCr 4:4:4 10bit (though I'm not sure how close wayland is to 10bit support). It will be fine for gaming, just not for everyday PC use. FWIW I also didn't realise this until just now. I've been running my desktop at 4k@120hz recently for the buttery smooth neovide, but have been noticing that text rendering, especially syntax-highlighted text, looks awful. I'd seen the same oled panel render text way better in WSL/Windows (both using a custom pixel geometry[0] via Mactype, but also without), so I spent more time than I'm willing to admit to wrapping my head around custom pixel layouts and hinting in freetype. But no, turns out it was this all along. If you want to see the effect of 420 vs 444 chroma subsampling on text rendering, this writeup[1]

If only. There's a ticket open with Microsoft's PowerToys to improve the anti-aliasing situation: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595 And heres an explanation from the dev of MacType about how DirectWrite can cause different applications to perform text rendering differently from each other: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/DirectWrite-vs-GD...

It basically patches/intercepts system-wide text drawing calls, and does its own drawing instead. There are some hints how it works here https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Secure-Boot I played around with this back when I used Windows, maybe 5 years ago (so my opinion may be out of date). It made text look better on the laptop screen (high dpi) but worse on external monitors (low dpi). That made sense because Apple doesn't sell anything with a low dpi display, but Windows still needs to care about them, so it does a lot of extra stuff like font hinting to make rendering look good as dpi scales down.

There are screenshots in issue [0] shared by users. My MacType profile repo [1] also has screenshots for comparison. You might see differences between screenshots because MacType works with a profile containing customizable configurations which can tweak font rendering behaviors as per demands (and I think this is why the README does not include screenshots). [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 [1] https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots

There are screenshots in an issue on their bug tracker[0]. This is an interesting project—Windows’s font rendering is definitely one of the things I dislike about it the most—and they are doing themselves a disservice by not actually explaining clearly what it is or does. I wish Microsoft would provide a font rendering mode like this by default since from reviewing some of the wiki & README it sounds like this is some crazy hack that hooks into apps to intercept calls to DirectWrite and GDI and might break the entire OS. [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557

Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does, and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens). However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that. [0] https://github.com/snowie20

You might want to check out MacType https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Google-Chrome

I recently made the switch from Mac to Windows and have been using MacType - https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype to ease the transition.

Yeah but Windows has https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype