Feature wish: Subpixel hinting / anti-aliasing in font rendering?

[bluenote10]

floem looks very promising, but without subpixel hinting the rendering quality of fonts is rather poor (which was also the first thing I noticed in lapce). To match the font rendering quality of native apps it would be great to have subpixel hinting.

[Samuel-B-D]

+1 for this. This is the first thing I noticed about the Lapce floem port, it is a very significant downgrade from the font rendering that the Druid version of Lapce had. The current font rendering in floem not only doesn't have subpixel antialiasing, but is poorly hinted and very blurry, to a point that I personally consider non-usable on a 1080p display.

AFAIK, Druid never had subpixel font anti-aliasing to begin with, and Lapce had a custom implementation leveraging swash, with the anti-aliasing inspired by what was done in swash's demo

Could a similar approach be integrated directly into floem's font rendering?

[jrmoulton]

Floem currently does use swash for font rendering.

At some point we will likely switch to using Vello for rendering and I expect these issues to be fixed when we make that change. Vello currently isn't ready to be integrated into floem yet though.

To edit/fix/update/change font rendering in floem you can take a look at our fork of cosmic text(floem branch) and how it integrates with swash for rendering