Better text on native targets?

#1

I’m porting a legacy Flash project that uses tons of typography, and can’t get nice crisp font rendering working from either textfields in SWF assets (there are lots of these) or indeed with text fields I create at runtime. On Flash/AIR targets everything is perfect, but when I compile for neko/native everything turns into a blurry mess.

This is most noticeable on retina screens, I’m using allow-high-dpi=“true” and have antialiasing turned on but the text is still really poor.

I know the way fonts are rendered is completely different, is this simply something I have to live with or is it possible to get close to the quality of Flash/AIR and I’m doing something wrong?

Thanks!

#2

I do not think that text is being upscaled for retina displays.

Does it look blurry to you on standard DPI screens? Are you using a pixel font?

#3

I think you’re right, yes - on an OSX retina screen the scaling works correctly (and reports 144 DPI and a scale factor of 2). The issue seems to be specific to Windows not upscaling in any way (on this Dell XPS/Windows 10 machine it still reports 72DPI and a scale of 1, which isn’t correct as this is a high res/4k screen).

Are there any plans to support hi def screens on Windows? Or is there a workaround you can think of?

Thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

#4

(I’m not currently using bitmap fonts, this is a legacy Flash project with lots of textfields all over the place, so just regular embedded fonts. They look great at high res on OSX!)

#5

I don’t know if SDL is going to get high DPI support on Windows soon?

#6

Interesting. Would be very nice, but not a huge dealbreaker at this stage. Would be lovely but I assume I shouldn’t hold my breath…

#7

What is the configuration in your project.xml ?.

As I recall, when we investigated OpenFL, we were developing a complete interactive with many screens (as well as texts in them) based on the swf workflow (all images, texts, etc, inside swf). It looked good on all targets. Windows target included. Everything that was text (or vector) scaled well according to resolution (27" monitor - 1920x1080). As far as I know windows target is independent of dpi. In fact it doesn’t make much sense to depend on dpi (depending on what type of project).

So if the text looks bad (blurry), it seems rather a problem with the configuration of the project.xml, or with something you have under the hood (scale, etc). Or there may be a specific problem in hyper high resolution displays (4k). I don’t know if that is the case.

#8

I thought it might be a configuration/scaling issue too, but I replicated with a completely fresh project. Everything looks OK on a 1080p screen, it’s just higher res displays that don’t handle the scaling correctly.

#9

In that case it may have to do with a problem with very high resolutions. But I still think that it makes no sense that it is related to dpi … The vectors (+ texts) should look perfect regardless of the resolution.

Only blurry text is seen? Or are bitmap images (and the rest of the screen elements) blurred?

Maybe it has to do with some of the configuration of the graphics output / monitor in windows?. Maybe has something to do with the windows text/scale setting (have you tried 100%)?. This config is problematic in many programs.