For the sake of completeness , how long ago were those decisions made
and the objections raised?
On 29/07/2026 18:30, Philip Race wrote:
LCD is only the default on controls. Grayscale is the default
everywhere else.
Unhinted greyscale was a requirement to be able to do smooth animations.
But there were lots of objections to the poor quality that resulted on
controls,
particularly on windows where users expect it as that is the windows
norm.
So LCD was required to be the default on controls.
On mac where Apple did away with LCD, if you have a non-retina
display, text is not good (IMO).
For every person who thinks it is better, there'll be someone else who
passionately disagrees.
So unless there's a 100% sure-fire way to enable this only on "hidpi"
displays, I'd vote against it being the *default*.
-phil.
On 7/29/26 7:42 AM, Andy Goryachev wrote:
Fully agree with John here. The only concern is the backward
compatibility - any existing application that uses it will appear
slightly different.
I would support changing the default (and mentioning it in the
release notes).
-andy
From: John Hendrikx <[email protected]>
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at 03:13
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [External] : Re: Enable grayscale antialiasing by
default on Windows HiDPI displays?
My 2 cents; LCD rendering (like cleartype) was never good and more a
marketing gimmick than anything else. On high DPI displays you don't
need it, and on low DPI displays it just result in ugly colored fringes
on characters. This is so noticeable to me that even on very high DPI
displays it is the first thing I turn off on any new install. No need
for clown letters when grayscale smoothing is perfectly fine.
In FX, it also the first thing I disable, no matter what the scaling or
monitor DPI.
Since the time of low DPI screens is rapidly becoming ancient history, I
wouldn't be against changing the default to be grayscale.
--John
On 28/07/2026 23:54, Marius Hanl wrote:
From what I saw and understand, -fx-font-smoothing-type: gray; is
indeed a better default.
I think this is a topic worth to discuss.
-- Marius
Am 27.07.2026 um 20:23 schrieb Christopher Schnick:
I think most devs do not see this as a large issue as you have
the
ability to fix it with the property (or also
-fx-font-smoothing-type:
gray in css) You are right, the default font rendering settings
are not
the best, but JavaFX is not really
I think most devs do not see this as a large issue as you have the
ability to fix it with the property (or also -fx-font-smoothing-type:
gray in css)
You are right, the default font rendering settings are not the
best, but
JavaFX is not really known for having optimal default settings out of
the box in general. If you want to get something good out of it, you
have to do some work.
I can submit a PR to change the defaults, no idea whether that will be
accepted though.
On 21/07/2026 18:31, Glavo wrote:
Hey, does anyone care about this?
On Wed, Jun 3, 2026 at 12:31 PM Glavo <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi everyone,
We have noticed that, for JavaFX applications on Windows HiDPI
displays,
subpixel antialiasing often produces very poor rendering results
for many
fonts.
For example, when using the MiSans font on a display scaled to
150%, the
edges of English letters rendered with subpixel antialiasing show
very
noticeable jagged artifacts:
https://imgur.com/ZpzDWZ5
For Chinese text, the results of subpixel antialiasing are even more
disastrous. Many strokes either blur together or show obvious
inconsistencies in thickness, making the text look very poor.
To address this issue, we tried forcing grayscale font
antialiasing by
adding -Dprism.lcdtext=false. After testing many fonts, we found
that on
HiDPI displays, grayscale antialiasing is never worse than subpixel
antialiasing, and it fixes rendering issues for many fonts. On
non-HiDPI
displays, that is, at 100% scaling, grayscale antialiasing and
subpixel
antialiasing each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
We then added a workaround in our application: on Windows, if the
primary
screen scale is greater than 100%, the application automatically
adds the
JVM option -Dprism.lcdtext=false to enable grayscale antialiasing.
After a
year of real-world use, we have not received any user complaints
about this
strategy.
I hope JavaFX can provide a built-in mechanism for automatically
selecting
the appropriate antialiasing algorithm, so that users do not have
to adjust
these options manually.
Glavo
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