Subpixel Text Encoding

PaulHoule · on July 23, 2023

Microsoft jumped into this with both feet in the early days of sRGB and LED monitors and used this idea to improve text rendering in Windows (not as such radically small sizes!), but before long it wasn't so predictable exactly what the pixel layout is and with denser pixel layouts the tradeoff between slightly better pixel resolution and color noise broke differently.

I absolutely adore anything about taking advantages of fine details in visual technology to get out that last few percent of performance or to encode or discover things hidden in plain site, that's a major motivation of my crafting hobby.

noisem4ker · on July 23, 2023

>it wasn't so predictable exactly what the pixel layout is

I could almost understand this argument when Microsoft started abandoning ClearType, although somewhat later, with the Metro user interface, with the explanation that tablets could be rotated freely and the layout had to be continuously re-adjusted.

Apart from that, only once in my life I've encountered a non-RGB LCD monitor: it had a BGR arrangement. With the default ClearType settings, text looked blurry and edges exhibited horrible color aberration. I think no one else ever understood what was wrong with it, so it was mostly relegated to a closet. Shame on you, Philips: there was no reason at all to pick an inverted order for your subpixels.

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Now that I remember, Sharp also did something funky on its Aquos TVs: they had a fourth, yellow subpixel. ClearType only ever supported R, G and B, so it would have worked poorly on them. I don't think many people ever tried to use them as PC monitors with 4:4:4 chroma to notice, though.

iamjackg · on July 24, 2023

I had a great run in with BGR a few years ago when I found out that some production batches of a Dell monitor model had BGR panels instead of RGB. I also had trouble getting other people to see what I was talking about.

Ended up writing a blog post about it: https://blog.jackgaino.dev/is-this-a-bgr-i-see-before-me

crazygringo · on July 23, 2023

It's not just alternate subpixel layouts and rotation.

It breaks screenshots when viewed on another device. It breaks any kind of scaling.

So it was a lot of effort for something that broke a lot of assumptions, and mostly made irrelevant with the advent of hi-DPI screens.

atan2 · on July 23, 2023

This is incredible. I just saw the same link being posted on @pikuma's twitter page.