Are there plans to include gamma blending and stem darkening for rendering?

[Koustuv Kanungo]

As described by this freetype article: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/hinting/text-rendering-general.html

[Yevhen Popok]

Related to:

• iced-rs "web-colors" feature flag PR
• "COSMIC: More Alpha, More Fun!" (screenshot shows the usage of "web-colors" in cosmic-text).

[Koustuv Kanungo]

Yes, we finally got a DE with gamma blending for text. Now just waiting on stem darkening.

[Yevhen Popok]

Now just waiting on stem darkening.

I'd like it as well, but unfortunately, on Linux stem darkening might not look good with some OTF fonts.
For example, see issues with Noto Sans OTF:

• https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/attachment.cgi?id=859236
• https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-95336
• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6078

Pop!_OS currently uses OTF versions of Fira fonts.

I hope that either the developers of Freetype, the maintainers of iced, or the maintainers of COSMIC will be able to tweak/fix it somehow.

[Koustuv Kanungo]

I think the problem with those is that the fonts either aren't gamma blended (GTK), or use a value that doesn't match the display (I think Qt uses 1.8 instead of 2.2). I'm just guessing though, let's see what COSMIC devs come up with.

EDIT: Though this does raise the interesting question, what if the display in question doesn't use 2.2?

[ryuukk]

+1, text looks blurry

We also need subpixel rendering