Icons are looking bad on Windows 7

[goanpeca]

[ccordoba12]

From the title and text of your screenshot, it seems your Windows version is not using anti-aliasing.

[goanpeca]

True! Answer on http://superuser.com/questions/341636/why-windows-7-dialog-fonts-are-not-anti-aliased

[SylvainCorlay]

We should be able to force anti-aliasing with painter.setRenderHint(QPainter.Antialiasing) in the paint method. Will fix this this week-end.

[goanpeca]

I tried that. It made no difference. But let me know

[goanpeca]

Ok so it seems that when TrueType is enabled in windows, qtawesome results in aliased icons. This is unexpected, because apparently qt should use trueype if enabled...

[SylvainCorlay]

I also tried using font.setStyleStrategy(QFont.PreferAntialias) but no luck so far.

Besides, forcing the size to be multiple of 14, which is the pixel perfect size of font awesome and the spyder makes anti-aliasing less necessary.

[goanpeca]

@SylvainCorlay, yep I had tried that one as well, but it is a weird "bug" from qt I think. Still even at pixel perfect if no antialias is in place icons will look pixelated like an 80's game :-)

[SylvainCorlay]

Actually at pixel perfect size, it is difficult to see the difference .The problem remains for brand icons and such, (like the Python logo) which are not meant to be pixel perfect.

[SylvainCorlay]

@ccordoba12 I had some questions on gitter regarding your qt build on windows.

[ccordoba12]

We don't build Qt on Windows. We just use the binaries supplied by Riverbank (the company behind PyQt)

[SylvainCorlay]

It seems that the binaries are not configured to use directwrite on Windows 7.

See: http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/PyQt4/qfont.html

Please be aware that altering the hinting preference on Windows is available through the DirectWrite font engine. This is available on Windows Vista after installing the platform update, and on Windows 7. In order to use this extension, configure Qt using -directwrite. The target application will then depend on the availability of DirectWrite on the target system.

[ccordoba12]

Then what do we (i.e. Continuum) should do about it? Should we ask Riverbank for that option?

[SylvainCorlay]

It seems that directwrite was intended to replace GDI and should probably be the preferred way of rendering fonts on screen. Although I should make some more experiments with my own build to be able to make an educated recommendation. The problem is that I don't use windows too often and my development machine is a Linux one.

@kovidgoyal replied to my email on the PyQt mailing list with some pointers at where to look

A few observations though:

• even with ClearType and Smooth edges enabled (which is the default on all the machines I used, the fonts don't look quite as sharp as on linux, where is it nearly perfect.)
• At pixel perfect size of the font, the problem is much less visible. There are some options in how text is rendered to try using certain preferred sizes.

[ccordoba12]

Ok, let me know what you find to see what we can do about it in our side :-)

[SylvainCorlay]

Btw, there is also the FreeType font engine, which is used on linux, and can (apparently) be used for a windows build.
If one gets a build of qt where directwrite (or freetype) is enabled, it will support setting up hinting with QFont.setHintingPreference, and we will be able to choose what we prefer among PreferDefaultHinting PreferNoHinting PreferVerticalHinting PreferFullHinting.

	PreferDefaultHinting	PreferNoHinting	PreferVerticalHinting	PreferFullHinting
Win Vista (w/o Platform Update) and earlier	Full hinting	Full hinting	Full hinting	Full hinting
Win 7 and Win Vista (w/Platform Update) and DirectWrite enabled in Qt	Full hinting	Vertical hinting	Vertical hinting	Full hinting
FreeType	Operating System setting	No hinting	Vertical hinting (light)	Full hinting
Cocoa on Mac OS X	No hinting	No hinting	No hinting	No hinting

[SylvainCorlay]

@ccordoba12 you guys now ship freetype with Anaconda?

[ccordoba12]

Yes, I think we have it available on all platforms. I'm totally sure on Linux and Mac, but not so sure on Windows :-)

[goanpeca]

Should we close this @ccordoba12 ?

[ccordoba12]

Sure, let's do it.