Font rendering issues

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lgsl
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2020 8:00 pm

Font rendering issues

Post by lgsl »

TM renders fonts differently depending on the Window Manager/Desktop I'm using. Usually the difference is quite subtle (KDE vs. FVWM for instance), but in other cases like when TM runs in Enlightenment, the difference is quite evident. The rendering is quite poor.
I had a chat with the Enlightenment developer team and they tell me it is not (most likely) an issue with Enlightenment. After trying to reproduce this same issue with several different applications and being unable to do so, I can only conclude the same thing as E's team: It's TextMaker. There is no other way around it.

Things I tried:
1. Manually setting DPI for TM.
2. Renaming the SoftMaker folder in order to get a "clean" vanilla config. (This made things even worse since TM window can't be resized and it's size/geometry is oversized. Rendering remains the same)
3. Tweaking Enlightenment's scaling features.
4. Fully disabling Enlightenment's scaling features.

Update:
This is the way Enlightenment currently handles xft.

Please see attachments for details and let me know if there is anything else I can provide for you that may help.
Attachments
Enlightenment
Enlightenment
KDE
KDE
FVWM
FVWM
SuperTech
SoftMaker Team
SoftMaker Team
Posts: 2935
Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2020 5:31 pm

Re: Font rendering issues

Post by SuperTech »

Thanks for sharing your concern with the screenshots. Please click on ribbon command File | Options | Appearance and select appropriate option for "Smooth edges of screen fonts". You can try all four available options.
lgsl
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2020 8:00 pm

Re: Font rendering issues

Post by lgsl »

I already tried that before posting here. By default I had it set as subpixel, going for greyscale or no smooth edges made (as expected) things worse. I should also point out that the TM's UI is not affected, only the text inside the page.

I found a ridiculous workaround:

1. Set Enlightenment's scale to 1.2. (Turn off application scaling. Just let Enlightenment's UI scaling on. This is to say: Scaling only affects Enlightenment, not Applications)
2. Decrease font size and panel sizes for Enlightenment (once again, Applications not affected)
3. Restart TM.

This is an unusual behaviour. Having to upscale Enlightenment's UI so TM renders fonts correctly makes no sense. If this was a problem with Enlightenment then this issue would be reproducible with other Applications. It's not. Both GTK and QT applications works just fine. Same goes for other toolkits out there.
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