Subpixel rendering in Rosetta?

Apple pretty much doesn't keep that close of a watch on these forums. It is guys like you and me helping out other guys like you and me.

That being said, I can say with certanty that Rosetta supports sub-pixel rendering - I think...

If you have the developer tools installed there is an App called Pixie which will let you look at a zoomed in view of the pixels on the screen. You will notice that anything that supports sub-pixel rendering will have colored pixels around black text where things that do not, will not. (It is an artifact of the sub-pixel rendering)

This is where it gets interesting. Download HexEdit - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9366 . Open up any document and select the "find" menu item. The resulting find box should have text that is both sub-pixel rendered and text that is not! (Or at least that's what it looks like on my MacBook).

So it is clearly not a Rosetta issue. It has something to do with the UI elements used.

Please post back and confirm my findings.

MacBook Pro 2.17 + 2GB DDR2 | PowerBook Al 1.67 + 2GB DDR2 Mac OS X (10.4.5) BlackBerry 8700 | iPod Nano 4GB | iPod Video 60 GB

Also, there is a utility in the Applications/Utilities folder called DigitalColor Meter that can also act as a digital magnifying glass. Open it up and run the mouse cursor over some text running in Rosetta. That should answer your question as to whether subpixel anti-aliasing of fonts works under Rosetta or not.

I haven't read the definitive answer from someone with real knowledge about the subject neither. But it is puzzling for sure: on the PowerBook Word and Camino use sub-pixel rendering. On the MacBook Pro they no longer do. Camino is universal binary, so it doesn't use Rosetta (but some claim that its Gecko engine is not universal and does use Rosetta). Anyways I haven't seen a single app that runs on Rosetta that uses sub-pixel rendering.

Btw Pages and Keynote have never used sub-pixel rendering. On the PowerBook too they use conventional anti-aliasing.

By far the easiest way to zoom the display is by pressing cmd-option-8.

MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Camino is 100% native and whoever tells you otherwise is very wrong. Gecko is native, there's no emulation involved. This very notion is absurd because processes running in Rosetta and those running natively cannot pass notes, so to speak.

Sounds logical to me (and it is why I put it between parenthesis). But that makes it all the more puzzling as to why Camino is not to use sub-pixel rendering on the MacBook Pro whereas it does use sub-pixel rendering on the PowerBook.

The problem seems to centre around Carbon vs. Cocoa applications... tellingly iTunes doesn't render text in subpixels on Intel Macs!

The problem seems to centre around Carbon vs. Cocoa
applications... tellingly iTunes doesn't render text
in subpixels on Intel Macs! ...

...while Cocoa apps running in rosetta benefit from subpixel rendering!

it's a bug in intel OSX.

apps using quickdraw (mostly carbon apps) do not respect the system-wide font smoothing settings.

made a bug report #4598078 in ADC bug reporter

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On Intel Macs, the system-wide font anti-aliasing setting is ignored on apps that use QuickDraw to draw fonts (mostly Carbon apps), such as Firefox, iTunes, Word etc.

So regardless of the font anti-aliasing setting you have, the ugly blurry greyscale font anti-aliasing is done instead of the subpixel rendering.

This issue is causing a major strain to my eyes.


Steps to Reproduce:

Choose Subpixel rendering in Font preferences.
Open Apps that uses QuickDraw such as iTunes or Firefox.
Using apps like Digital Colormeter, look at the fonts and see that there is no colored fringes, i.e. no subpixel rendering.

Actual Results:

No subpixel rendering is done on apps that use QuickDraw (mostly Carbon apps).

Regression:

This only occurs on Intel-based Macs.

according to neilio [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilio/143516118/ ]

this bug is fixed in 10.4.7