I have only really tested JavaFX extensively on Windows so my comments here apply mainly to that platform.
It seems that even with a font smoothing type of LCD, font rendering in JavaFX is not at the same level of quality of native applications. My current experiences are with JavaFX 8 b103 and I find that all rendered text in JavaFX appears of a significantly poorer quality than that which I would see in Word for example or even in IE10 (which I believe uses the same text rendering engine). Also, these observations are based on text in "standard" controls and the quality of font rendering is dramatically worse within the Canvas control. I am not an expert in font technology but I have read many times that the levels of antialiasing for text that can be achieved in a GPU-based renderer are always going to be less than that achieved in a CPU-based renderer. This is often explained on the basis of graphics card drivers being optimised for performance and the rapid rendering of triangles commonly required in games rather than for rendering quality when it comes to text. Is this the reason why JavaFX font rendering appears less legible and of a lower quality than native apps? If so, how does IE10 for example achieve a higher quality of rendering when it seems to also use DirectWrite? Is the quality of JavaFX font rendering ever going to improve? Thanks, -jct
