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Font rendering: hinting and subpixel adjustments?


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How does AD render fonts, does it support hinting? I have problems with small type, as it seems to be unnecessarily blurry in most cases (8 points and smaller with pixel view). It looks like type hinting is not used and font control points are not adjusted to better fit the underlaying pixel grid.

 

Currently I do improvements by hand by moving type in subpixel increments to get clearer letters - which of course is a tradeoff as some letters get clearer and some get mushier. It would be better if AD did tiny type improvements per letter.

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Hi hevonen,

As far as i know Affinity Designer doesn't perform any specific text rendering adjustments to improve legibility in any size.

You can however change the Blend gamma and the antialiasing ramp (Coverage Map) of text objects individually to improve things a little.

To do it go to the Layers panel, click on the Blend Ranges icon (the little gear) on the top right of the panel and adjust the Coverage Map ramp (and gamma if needed) to better suit your needs (you can also save the profiles there).

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Hi, yes but it doesn't really help - glyph line positioned somewhere between pixels on the raster grid will spread to both pixels, making it mushy.

 

Is font hinting support planned? Most professional typefaces come with hints made by the type designer.

 

 

Though it would be awesome to expand this and have the option to snap _any_ outline or stroke to nearest pixel edge during pixel view and export to keep things at maximum sharpness even when exporting artwork at non-original resolutions, like for example 31% or 192%. Useful at least for game artists and I guess web artists too.

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  • 6 months later...

I would also really like font hinting.

 

The Blending Ranges feature helps with pixel fonts (where you basically kill antialiasing), but as hevonen said, not a lot with regular fonts.

 

I realise the end of this problem is in sight – what with retina displays – but it'll still take some years before font hinting is no longer needed. It's still relevant for UI design, games, and web icons.

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  • 1 year later...

Hi!

Years later, I still struggle with some files with small text. On Illustrator I used the (really cumbersome) "optimize for" either text or image and got the job done.

It wasn't always perfect, as I usually needed  to produce nice looking images AND text, so I usually ended up using the "Render" filter on either all text or images (whichever had fewer to select) to apply the optimization required only to that group, than exported with the other option (not sure if I'm making any sense, here). A far from perfect workaround , but it was pretty quick.

 

On AD, my actual workaround is to duplicate all text elements and adjust blending (often black and white text behave differently), which is quite sloppy.

I also tried the 4 different export methods, but text reacted the same way with bicubic, bilinear and Lanczos, with only the images being affected.

So I ask you: any better ideas?

 

Is font hinting being considered as a feature?

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I remember that Adobe Fireworks does a good work with smaill texts when exporting to raster images.

Something like that, and maybe some default presents, would make Affinity more appealing to UI designers.

Best regards!

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