Font drawing inconsistencies between Mac and Windows

[bxjoscha]

VSTGUI has the following two font drawing inconsistencies between Mac and Windows:

• On Mac, fonts are drawn thicker and smoother than on Windows
• On Windows, the anti-aliasing is not mono-chromatic as it is on Mac, but coloured

The following drawings are made with the current develop state of VSTGUI using the Hello World example app.

In the above image, the first image is not scaled correctly, so here again:

[scheffle]

Hi, this is the difference between the platform dependent font render engines. If you need pixel perfect text rendering then you should pre-render the text into bitmaps and use them instead. Or do you have any other idea how this could be done?

[bxjoscha]

Hi @scheffle, actually I was able to fix both issues in our internal VSTGUI fork that, unfortunately, is not up-to-date to the current VSTGUI state. Here are the two changes I have made internally (still need to be validated by our QA, but on my machine it worked).

Actually, that part of the code changed and I do not find the lines in the latest state of VSTGUI.

[bxjoscha]

I found the lines the current VSTGUI version as well:

https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vstgui/blob/develop/vstgui/lib/platform/mac/coregraphicsdevicecontext.mm#L904

https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vstgui/blob/develop/vstgui/lib/platform/win32/direct2d/d2dgraphicscontext.cpp#L845

[bxjoscha]

If the fix gets validated, I would create a PR, but you could also investigate already and perhaps you are happy changing the code by yourself.

[scheffle]

Hi @bxjoscha , I'm very busy at the moment, but I will take care of this in the coming weeks.