Font rendering issue
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I just saw news about Opera founders launching a new browser, so far all I have say is that this is really great for us who loved Opera 12, great speed dial, excellent load time, webm support.. etc But somehow the font rendering on my machine look a bit clunky, it's 61bit Windows 7 SP1. Picture related, compared with Opera 12 at the bottom. I've tried various combination of ClearType adjustment but no progess so far Hope you guys can look into this. [img]http://i.imgur.com/tNUhep5.png[/img]
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@RRR13:
But somehow the font rendering on my machine look a bit clunky, it's 61bit Windows 7 SP1.
It's a known fact that fonts render like crap on 61-bit Windows. :lol:
As will any 64-bit software run on a 61-bit system⦠:woohoo:
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But somehow the font rendering on my machine look a bit clunky, it's 61bit Windows 7 SP1.
Picture related, compared with Opera 12 at the bottom. I've tried various combination of ClearType adjustment but no progess so farIt's no wonder that tweaking ClearType gets you nowhere, given that Vivaldi doesn't use ClearType
It uses the same font rendering as Chromium does, whose font rendering is based on DirectWrite (like every other current HW-accelerated browser on Windows is), but, sadly, as in many other cases, Chromium devs choose to use their own solutions, which in this case means its font rendering also does something else with it and in my opinion not for the better. I'm not exactly sure what it is they do, but it seems they do apply some sort of sharpening to the fonts, resulting in a text that looks ugly, oversharpened and very thin when compared with a standard DirectWrite as Firefox or IE use it.
Vivaldi apparently just uses the stock Chromium font rendering, so it doesn't look all that great (not that DirectWrite in general is great when it comes to font rendering, but nowadays it's still the best we got, since we can no longer use utilities like MacType to force FreeType based font rendering).
Interestingly enough, the current Opera seems to use a slightly modified font rendering than Chromium, which doesn't sharpen the glyphs as much (even if they still look smudged and thin, but that's partly DirectWrite's fault as well) and looks a bit nicer.
BTW, when using Chromium-based browsers, I tend to use a global user-style altering the font shadow properties, which gives the fonts a bit more beefier and contrasty look I find somewhat easier to read and to look at, though it's really just a basic and ugly crutch and doesn't even work under all circumstances:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); HTML { -webkit-text-stroke: 0.0px !important; text-shadow: 0.2px 0.2px 0.2px rgba(0,0,0, 0.2), -0.2px -0.2px 0.2px rgba(0,0,0, 0.2) !important; }
Though I'm still dreaming of a possibility to throw away DirectWrite entirely and just replace it with a fully user-tweakable FreeType 2 font renderer. It will probably never happen, but one can dream
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There is a flag in the vivaldi://flags section:
Disable DirectWrite Windows
Disables the use of experimental DirectWrite font rendering system. #disable-direct-writeThe implication there seems to be that there's an experimental aspect to Vivaldi's DW font rendering system. As far as actually enabling that "disable" flag (another of those curious set-'yes'-to-cause-'no' terminologies), I've not tried it and have no idea what, if any, chaos it might cause.
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Ah, you're right, totally forgot about that flag (I feel like maybe it didn't work correctly last time I tried it in Chromium and then I lost interest in it). It still does render fonts a bit differently, but it's pretty close to ClearType (you can only tell the difference when doing side by side comparison) and OP might find it more to his/her liking.
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