QB64 Phoenix Edition v3.12.0 Released!

[SMcNeill]

I swear, you guys have better eyes than me.  If this was a game of spot-the-difference, I'd lose.  Ijust can't tell any change in those words.  What's different aboutthem?  What am I missing?  LOL!

Look at the capital Ms and Ns in the text. The left vertical legs of each is very thin. This happens with other vertical lines as well, but is easily seen in the Ms and Ns. Horizontal lines seem to be affected too to a lesser degree.

Bplus' images show a much more degraded lettering than mine though. The difference between operating systems perhaps?

I had this issue with "thin" letters ages ago, with my new PC.  Turned out it was a problem with FXAA anti-aliasing working too hard to smooth images all the time, and that tended to fade out the edges of my letters.  

Since this is using a newer version of TrueType, I would guess that it's trying to do this same type anti-aliasing with the letters.  Just for curiousity's sake, can you go into Nvidea Control Panel and turn FXAA off and see if the issue persists?  (It may require a reboot; I don't remember if it does or doesn't.)  If that's all there is, then there may be some option in the new library to toggle that effect off for our letters.

[TerryRitchie]

I swear, you guys have better eyes than me.  If this was a game of spot-the-difference, I'd lose.  Ijust can't tell any change in those words.  What's different aboutthem?  What am I missing?  LOL!

Look at the capital Ms and Ns in the text. The left vertical legs of each is very thin. This happens with other vertical lines as well, but is easily seen in the Ms and Ns. Horizontal lines seem to be affected too to a lesser degree.

Bplus' images show a much more degraded lettering than mine though. The difference between operating systems perhaps?

I had this issue with "thin" letters ages ago, with my new PC.  Turned out it was a problem with FXAA anti-aliasing working too hard to smooth images all the time, and that tended to fade out the edges of my letters.  

Since this is using a newer version of TrueType, I would guess that it's trying to do this same type anti-aliasing with the letters.  Just for curiousity's sake, can you go into Nvidea Control Panel and turn FXAA off and see if the issue persists?  (It may require a reboot; I don't remember if it does or doesn't.)  If that's all there is, then there may be some option in the new library to toggle that effect off for our letters.

I will as soon as I figure out an issue with my system I just discovered. nVidia Control Panel crashes every time I try to open it? I don't know when this started happening as I have not used this in a while now. I'm checking for a driver update now to see if that will resolve the issue.

[TerryRitchie]

Well that didn't go well! LOL Thank goodness I made a restore point before attempting the driver upgrade. Someone else will need to check their nVidia settings. It seems I have a video card issue to sort out now. Yeah.

[bplus]

I am noticing a big difference in the quality of print when I use Lucon.ttf at 18 pixels that Terry first showed us:
Here I show v3.10 print (left) versus v3.12 print (right side).


So was something changed in the way of handling fonts in IDE?

Well, we moved to the current version of FreeType (2.4.12 to 2.13.2). The one that we had before was from 2013.

What / Where is FreeType used? I thought I was using a Windows Font?
   

I am seeing the shoddiness in allot of the verticals n, m, u, h, d, b, p... Lucon under 18 wasn't so great before this change but 18 really looked great! Really pleasant on these old eyes. Now although 19, 20 improves quality a little, it's just not nearly as good plus I lose too many characters per line and too few lines in screen height to go higher. Need over 100 chars across and over 38 lines down.

What was reason to change? It was just newer? Did this change improve something else like font print quality in output screens?

[zaadstra]

Wow!  I love the _CRC32 and _READFILE$ commands!  

Thank you @RhoSigma-QB64 for these nice additions.

[a740g]

@bplus @TerryRitchie I think what you are seeing is the change in the subpixel hinting behavior in newer versions of FreeType. Technically this would mean that any application that uses the current version of FreeType will have the same behavior.

That said, I think there is a way to tell FreeType to select a different hinting behavior with FT_LOAD_TARGET_xxx

https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/hint...nting.html
https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/hint...neral.html

The good part about all this is that _LOADFONT takes optional comma separated parameters:
handle& = _LOADFONT(fontFileName$, size&[, "comma_separated_parameters"][, fontIndex&]) 

So, we could easily introduce some new options for _LOADFONT that allows us to pick the hinting type we want.
We can perhaps use the older hinting behavior by default and let users use the newer behavior or FreeType default behavior if they want. 

Interesting stuff really. I'll deep drive into this when I get some time.

[bplus]

"different hinting behavior" wow sounds like we are training AI ;-))

I guess fonts are no longer written in stone.

[Kernelpanic]

It works! 

[Pete]

Why is it every time I type a line of code, the new IDE has a message box pop open that says, "Steve is laughing!" Aside from that, it's installed, up, and working.

Pete

[NakedApe]

Thanks again to the dev team for their hard work on the ever-improving QB64PE!    You guys rock.

Ted