Text better than Beta 4- but stil not as good as Beta 3 and before?

Looking at the new Beta 5 the text does look better, but I don't think it is as good as it was in Beta 3. This is a real concern. One of the main reasons I switched to a Mac is because my digital library is rendered more appeasing on the screen. In the forum posts it was commented that the switch done in Beta 4 was to help speed up the program, but I didn't notice any permformance increase. Do other people think the text was better in Beta 3 than Beta 5? To the developers, who have been doing an amazing job, I would ask and urge you to consider returning the text display to the way it was in Beta 3 and prior. Thanks for your time.

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Comments

Stuart Robertson

Beta 5 is much better - though I agree that the new font rendering is not as precise as beta 3 had. It looks as though the fonts are being rendered with LCD sub-pixel antialiasing turned off. And text looks much "thinner" now than it did in beta 3 - that is, the default serif font and others such as Palatino, etc all look "lighter" (less bold, one might say). This is one of the differences that I always liked about the Mac - the on-screen font rendering looked more like real printed type and less "washed out" than Windows.

I'm curious - is Logos for Mac still using OS X to render the text or is text rendering being done using Mono's rendering (rendered off-screen to a bitmap) and then the "bitmap" rapidly displayed on-screen? Or is the "rendering improvement" of the last few weeks still using OS X's native text rendering?

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/213865#Comment_213865

Stuart, Norman,

Out of curiosity, what kind of display are you running on?

Stuart Robertson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/213996#Comment_213996

17" Macbook Pro (late 2010 model), 1920x1200, matte display.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214004#Comment_214004

17" Macbook Pro (late 2010 model), 1920x1200, matte display.

Well, that explains it. Most of the Logos 4 Mac devs have Mac Pros hooked up to Dell monitors which AFAICT don't do the same LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing that Apple Displays do. Even comparing TextEdit on my 30" Dell to TextEdit on a 27" iMac shows that the Apple displays render differently wrt LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

All that said, I understand what the issue is and we'll look at how we can get Beta 3 text rendering back with the display/scrolling refresh speed ups in Beta 5.

Robin Lee

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214008#Comment_214008

You can tell it is still fuzzy.

Norman J Meyer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214008#Comment_214008

Thanks Tom! - and just to verify your conclusions, I also have a 17" Macbook Pro (early 2009), 1900x1200 matte display.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214008#Comment_214008

Well, that explains it. Most of the Logos 4 Mac devs have Mac Pros hooked up to Dell monitors which AFAICT don't do the same LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing that Apple Displays do. Even comparing TextEdit on my 30" Dell to TextEdit on a 27" iMac shows that the Apple displays render differently wrt LCD sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

All that said, I understand what the issue is and we'll look at how we can get Beta 3 text rendering back with the display/scrolling refresh speed ups in Beta 5.

Actually, I found this article that talks about how to enable sub-pixel LCD rendering on external monitors:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2179535

Dewayne Davis

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214004#Comment_214004

17" Macbook Pro (late 2010 model), 1920x1200, matte display.

Same here.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214017#Comment_214017

Here's a side by side of the Beta 3 (and prior) rendering with sub-pixel antialiasing enabled with AppleFontSmoothing set to 2 (Medium, Recommend for LCDs). [My personal preference is AppleFontSmoothing set to 1, or Light font smoothing.]

Here is the Beta 4-5 rendering with sub-pixel anti-aliasing disabled

The "disabling" of sub-pixel anti aliasing was an unintentional regression compounded by the fact that Mac OS X doesn't turn on sub-pixel antialiasing by default on some external non-Apple monitors, so none of the devs noticed it.

Stuart Robertson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214021#Comment_214021

Looking forward to the fix... :-) Thanks for the quick response on this Tom.

Patrick S.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214021#Comment_214021

The "disabling" of sub-pixel anti aliasing was an unintentional regression compounded by the fact that Mac OS X doesn't turn on sub-pixel antialiasing by default on external monitors, so none of the devs noticed it.

Tom when you say external monitors do you mean non-Apple branded monitors? I have an Apple 23" Cinema display (previous generation) connected to my Mac Pro and I'm pretty sure that it is using sub-pixel antialiasing (my display renders same as iMac my wife has).

Do the Mac developers have any Apple external displays and/or new large screen iMacs that you do testing of Logos 4 on?

Just curious.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214676#Comment_214676

Tom when you say external monitors do you mean non-Apple branded monitors? I have an Apple 23" Cinema display (previous generation) connected to my Mac Pro and I'm pretty sure that it is using sub-pixel antialiasing (my display renders same as iMac my wife has).

I should have said "some non-Apple external monitors". I'll edit my original post shortly.

Do the Mac developers have any Apple external displays and/or new large screen iMacs that you do testing of Logos 4 on?

Some Mac devs have MacPros with external Dell monitors and some have new iMacs with integrated Apple displays.

Norman J Meyer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/214748#Comment_214748

Tom - It looks like the text display issues are resolved in Beta 6. Thanks a ton for all your work on this! My Mac experience is back! - norm

Daniel Arnott

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/218028#Comment_218028

agreed text looks nice

Now to allow us to choose the amount of columns on reading mode! [:)]

Wes Saad

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/218033#Comment_218033

Now to allow us to choose the amount of columns on reading mode!

You mean like this:

Stuart Robertson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/218033#Comment_218033

Text looks beautiful, crisp and clear again on my Macbook. Thanks very much to Tom, et al for the attention and quick response on this. It makes reading and Bible study using Logos much easier on the eyes -- and almost as good as a printed book (at least, as far as I'm concerned :-) )

Daniel Arnott

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/218053#Comment_218053

Hi Chris

No I mean when you go to page view

Dan

Wes Saad

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/218252#Comment_218252

No I mean when you go to page view

This is the way Page view works now. Instead of simply saying enter page view, you tell it how many columns you want, or set it to auto. Unless I'm not understanding something about what you're looking for.

I'm assuming the default is set to Auto, so if you just use the keyboard shortcut to enter page view, it will take you to auto columns which will act like it used to. But go select one of those column settings and see if that does what you are wanting.

The screenshot below shows Logos in reading view, set to two columns: