Make subpixel smoothing default?

Matthew Miller mattdm at mattdm.org
Tue Oct 21 14:38:30 UTC 2008


On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 09:16:48AM -0500, Dr. Diesel wrote:
> >> I didn't even know this option existed, and man does it look better!
> >> Considering 95% of displays are now LCDs should this option be the
> >> default?
> > For the record, it made things look like utter crap on my display. And
> > it's an LCD. If people want it, they can get it.
> I'm willing to bet the vast majority will find it looks better, if in
> your case, they can turn it off...

It depends a lot on your monitor. If you've got relatively large pixels, the
colored fringes can be very visible and distracting. If you've got a
high-PPI monitor, it can look quite good -- but then, of course, you need
it less.

I also find that it looks much worse for light text on black background
(i.e. old-school terminal windows) than for dark text on light (the typical
modern default terminals and most modern web sites).

But here's my concern with making it the default: if you get the subpixel
layout wrong, it looks very very bad. What percentage of monitors are RGB
instead of BGR? (Might it be possible for HAL (or something) to tell the
desktop enviroment this?) What about tablets? -- if you rotate the screen
90°, your text is definitely horribly wrong in one of the orientations.


<http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php> is useful here, by the way. It'd
be nice if the desktop UIs for this option presented a similar test (if
indeed there is no good way to get the information automatically.)


-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect 
Cyberinfrastructure Labs
Computing & Information Technology 
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences




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