mactype VS ProjectReunion

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.

This is great work btw.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...

HDMI 2.0 is capable of doing 4k @ 120Hz, but only up to YCbCr 4:2:0 8bit instead of the full YCbCr 4:4:4 10bit (though I'm not sure how close wayland is to 10bit support). It will be fine for gaming, just not for everyday PC use.

FWIW I also didn't realise this until just now. I've been running my desktop at 4k@120hz recently for the buttery smooth neovide, but have been noticing that text rendering, especially syntax-highlighted text, looks awful. I'd seen the same oled panel render text way better in WSL/Windows (both using a custom pixel geometry[0] via Mactype, but also without), so I spent more time than I'm willing to admit to wrapping my head around custom pixel layouts and hinting in freetype. But no, turns out it was this all along.

If you want to see the effect of 420 vs 444 chroma subsampling on text rendering, this writeup[1] has some great test images and is well worth a read. Also, if you happen to have an LG OLED panel, you can get a little debug window that confirms your signal format and refresh rate, by pressing the green button on the remote 7-8 times.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/720

Mactype is an application used to improve font rendering on Windows. Install Mactype from here: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/releases/download/v1.2023.5.31/mactype-20230531.zip

Download Mactype. If you download the beta version (warning: it will trip windows defender) you can use one of the QD-OLED profiles, if you download the last stable version (has an installer and will not trip Windows defneder), use a grayscale rendered font like this one. It doesn't work on chromium browsers though so you're gonna have to use Firefox if you want it to be on your browser.

If only. There's a ticket open with Microsoft's PowerToys to improve the anti-aliasing situation:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

And heres an explanation from the dev of MacType about how DirectWrite can cause different applications to perform text rendering differently from each other:

https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/DirectWrite-vs-GD...

There's an open source text rendering engine called MacType, it does what you'd think (make it look like Mac). Fonts are a visual delight after that, and it's highly configurable.

Already supported in WPF and DirectWrite. AFAIK DirectWrite by default only uses y-axis at large font sizes. I think MacType enables it system-wide.

I'm using standalone mode (load with tray). It can definitely work with browsers, as mentioned here: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/931. Their github has considerations and workarounds for each, such as this page for Chrome: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Google-Chrome

Step 2: Install it from the MacType homepage, it is an open-source project so it seems safe to me. I recommend installing it in "Load with MacTray" -> "Standalone Mode".

The issue is described here: WebView2 does not support passing in a CoreWebView2Environment · Issue #1170 · microsoft/WindowsAppSDK (github.com)

.. and how many of the Microsoft applications actually use WinUI3? As far as I can tell they're doing their own thing (Office) or are Electron (Teams) or, at least in Windows 10, haven't actually been updated from WinForms.

The overhead of WinUI3 is pretty huge. The visual designer, a winning feature of Visual Studio for decades, is AWOL. Why? It's XAML, the same as the previous XAML designer! It's just .. broken?

The backward compatibility story is a disaster: you can get stuck in the UWP sandbox https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/1780

What's the big Microsoft WinUI3 flagship app, then? Something people are actually using? Rather than just a few system dialogues. (How many Win11 settings pop up a Win32 dialogue box, still?)

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

As far as I know, there are still some issues with OIDC integration. See this, for example.

this I'm interested in. WinAppSDK is open source.

I think the issue is actually the sandboxing and other stuff. WinRT StorageProvider API is known to be extremely slow and NTFS / Windows IO subsystem is itself already quite slow compared to UNIX. The issue IIRC is that StorageProvider is designed for sandboxing and the way they implemented that involves doing RPCs to other processes. So there's probably some heavy context switching involved, but it's architectural, and so the voice recorder was never fixed.

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/8

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. I even work on WindowsAppSDK just not the WinUI parts. People far more graphically inclined and talented than I handle that 😀