Re:Text Rendering Hates You
by TheRealPomax on Monday June 26, 2023 @11:54AM
(#36481430)
Note that for (1), you're going to have to explain your logic there, because retina displays still need subpixel rendering. They're nowhere near the print industry's standard 300 dpi, they're (a little less than) 300 ppi. For a "three different colours arranged in in blocks of four" screen, you'd need closer to 1200ppi before "we don't need subpixel rendering" is actually true. Until then, the raster tragedy may become less noticeable to people who are used to reading simplistic orthographies (like English), but it's very much still there for more complex orthographies (like, say, almost every middle-eastern, asian, and east-asian orthography)
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Was just quoting the author. But also it appears that Apple disagrees with you, since they seem to have turned off sub pixel AA five years ago in macOS Mojave. See [1]. Indeed when I screen-captured and scaled up the non-western script in the article, there was no sub pixel AA on my Mac.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_...
Well, "need" is subjective, but subpixel rendering introduces costs elsewhere in the system, so the threshold to turn it off might reasonably be lower than absolute parity with print.
In particular, subpixel rendering introduces performance and interoperability problems when the text is rendered on a layer that's semitransparent, rotated or used on more than one physical display (or that may become one of those things in the future -- that's the really tricky part). Everyone agrees it's absolutely needed on traditional low-dpi displays, but whether it remains a good idea or not on "retina" displays is a judgment call.
Grayscale AA is still common on Retina screens, but subpixel AA is rare. Mostly because subpixel AA is difficult to do compositing with transparency with, but also because it's less necessary on Retina screens. The tradeoffs are just to the point that it's not considered worth it.