Swaybar subpixel font rendering

[mrlotfi]

I am using sway version 1.0-beta.1-211-gbf7af9c6 (Nov 20 2018, branch 'master') on archlinux. I felt that the fonts are a bit blurry on the swaybar compared to i3bar. So I took a screenshot and found that the swaybar is not using subpixel rendering. On the other hand window titles are rendered properly. Is this the expected behaviour or is this a bug?

[emersion]

I thought we had subpixel rendering in swaybar. Are you using fractional scaling?

[vperilla]

I am using factional scaling

[mrlotfi]

I thought we had subpixel rendering in swaybar. Are you using fractional scaling?

No. I have only overridden the default font using font pango: xxxxxx option.

[emersion]

We do use cairo subpixel font rendering. Not sure what's wrong here.

[lephe]

FWIW, I have the same gray antialias here (just built sway 77554f5 on wlroots c70b8f6) and a close-to-default configuration. The relevant part would be...

bar {
    status_command i3blocks
    position top
    font "Droid Sans Mono 10"
    colors { ... }
}

My display is HiDPI (1920×1080) but the scale factor is 1.

[ggreer]

Perhaps it's a bug detecting your screen's subpixel output. In common/cairo.c, to_cairo_subpixel_order() defaults to CAIRO_SUBPIXEL_ORDER_DEFAULT if the subpixel order is WL_OUTPUT_SUBPIXEL_UNKNOWN. That renders text with antialiasing and no hinting. I have this bug on one of my laptops, but it uses an eDP->LVDS converter.

I guess some debug logging in that function could be useful.

[emersion]

You can check subpixel is correctly detected with weston-info.

[lephe]

Interestingly weston-info fails in my case:

interface: 'wl_output', version: 3, name: 24
	x: 0, y: 0, scale: 1,
	physical_width: 344 mm, physical_height: 193 mm,
	make: 'Unknown', model: '0x38ED',
	subpixel_orientation: unknown, output_transform: normal,
	mode:
		width: 1920 px, height: 1080 px, refresh: 40.064 Hz,
		flags:
	mode:
		width: 1920 px, height: 1080 px, refresh: 60.096 Hz,
		flags: current

I'm not sure which API is responsible for detecting it -is this the Wayland server? I'm wondering if it's possible to specify subpixel alignment in a static way (such as a config file).

[emersion]

wlroots detects your output's subpixel orientation. It does so via DRM (drmModeConnector.subpixel).

[ascent12]

wlroots detects your output's subpixel orientation. It does so via DRM (drmModeConnector.subpixel).

Also note that a bunch of hardware doesn't report this to us, so it's often just "unknown".

[RedSoxFan]

Closing via #3645