[Bug]: Equal Sign Hard to Read

[jlanzarotta]

Edition

Basic (Personal)

What version are you using?

2.005

What type of weights are you using?

Default (non-customized)

Operating system

Windows 10

Program

Vim, IntelliJ

Display resolution

1920 x 1080

What happened?

Here is a screenshot from 2.005. As you can see, the top bar is not clear...

As compared with 2.003...

[MarcusSterz]

There have been no changes inbetween those versions. Nonetheless I have added additional hints to hyphen and will add more to related glyphs. This might improve the rendering.

[jlanzarotta]

Not sure if this help narrow down what is going on nor not... but here is a bit more information. I normally use 9 point, which the equal sign looks bad... However, if I bump the font up to 12 point, it looks good.

[sonulohani]

I am also seeing the same issue when the font size is small

If I make the size large then I don't see blur anymore.

[MarcusSterz]

In general: The smaller the size the more blur you see. Even pixel sizes (12, 14, ...) tend to work better mostly. Also MacOS does different hinting than Windows which makes it pretty unpredictable for us.

[jlanzarotta]

This is definitely odd as it only seems to happen with the equal and minus signs... And I see what you are saying about blur... Here are a few more samples...

9-Point

10-Point

11-Point

12-Point

[bebraw]

Could you check with 2.006? There's a potential fix for this one.

[bebraw]

We've added what we call prereleases to the orders UI. If you head to https://www.monolisa.dev/orders, you should see the following:

Can you download the prerelease version and let us know if it's looking better now? Internally it's using a different build tool and applying hinting in a different way than before.

[sonulohani]

I dont see any difference.

[jlanzarotta]

Thanks for the update. I will give it a try tomorrow and report back my findings.

[jlanzarotta]

Unfortunately, I do not see a difference.

Here is a screenshot from a regular Windows Command prompt. The top line of the equal sign looks lighter than the bottom line.

[jlanzarotta]

Here is something that might be of interest... When I turn off Windows ClearType... the issue goes away... Here is a couple of examples using a program called Cmder. I can control the Anti-aliasing much easier using this...

Here is an example with ClearType off...

Here is an example with ClearType on...

Another interesting things is that each of these screenshots have the same number of "=" characters and the same 16 point font. However, the one with ClearType is so much larger...

[bebraw]

@MarcusSterz If you have a Windows box, maybe trying VTT is worth it as using that tool should help to understand how = is rendered when ClearType is enabled. Somehow it gets confused with the current shape and tries to compensate somehow perhaps.

[jlanzarotta]

I installed VTT, opened up the preview version of the font and selected the "=" character.

Not sure if the stackoverflow issue is anything... But I got that error on each character I opened...

[bebraw]

@jlanzarotta Out of curiosity, assuming some other font like Fira Code renders fine for you in this case, what does VTT show then?

[jlanzarotta]

Here is Source Code Pro...

[jlanzarotta]

Here is Fira Code...

[MarcusSterz]

I just checked with Fira, Jetbrains Mono and Recursive in VTT. This stack overflow error is shown everywhere, I would not be bothered by that. @jlanzarotta which Fira Code version did you check?

[jlanzarotta]

FiraCode v6.2.