Improved font rendering with Direct2D

[poiru]

what i meant (sorry for bad English) was: does Rainmeter's font rendering still look right when you compare it with the OS font rendering? ... you might also have noticed while zooming that Rainmeter's font smoothing seems to be monochrome. not so in your text editor.

Most Windows desktop applications use GDI, which produces different results compared to both GDI+ and DirectWrite. DirectWrite supports ClearType (we're currently using grayscale anti-aliasing) and also has a GDI-compatibile rendering mode. I will investigate this for the next beta and hopefully we can work something out.

[Virginityrocks]

When can authors expect D2D to be defaulted?

[poiru]

When can authors expect D2D to be defaulted?

In a week or two, hopefully. In any case, it will definitely be the default for the final 3.0 release.

[Seahorse]

In a week or two, hopefully. In any case, it will definitely be the default for the final 3.0 release.

It's several weeks on, can you please advise on the current status of D2D...

[poiru]

Wasn't sure if this deserved a separate thread. Just noticed that with D2D rendering, AA on resized images is a lot poorer than with GDI+. Look at the antennae portion of the images.

This has been fixed in the latest beta.

It's several weeks on, can you please advise on the current status of D2D...

We're working on it. That's all I can say at this point.

[jsmorley]

As of the Release Candidate of Rainmeter 3.0 available today at http://rainmeter.net, Direct2D (D2D) has been made the default behavior.

http://rainmeter.net/cms/Release30

[Frostschaden]

So if it's possible to disable D2D on a skin by right clicking and disabling through the skins context menu, is there a way to disable this within [Rainmeter] section of the skin?
I know poiru mentioned he had planned to

add support for customizable settings for D2D at some point.

I tried using UseD2D=0 under [Rainmeter] of the skin with no luck other than using it in the layout, so I assumed this isn't possible or perhaps I am doing something wrong. The problem is my text seems to be distorted. The font is Trebuchet MS, an example, the zeros become more round rather than oblong like they used to be. Disabling D2D resolves this as well as reduces the harsh contrast. Am I out of luck?

[Brian]

So if it's possible to disable D2D on a skin by right clicking and disabling through the skins context menu, is there a way to disable this within [Rainmeter] section of the skin?

No, and we do not have current plans to do this. The goal of D2D is to be user specific, and not "distributed" with skins. You can turn off D2D as a whole, or per skin...but you can't specify it in a skin.

Just as a side note, you can manually place "UseD2D=0" under each skin section of "Rainmeter.ini". This is actually where the setting on the context menu gets saved. I personally find it easier to use the context menu myself. We may add a checkbox in the Manage dialog in the future, but we really haven't discussed that yet.

-Brian

[jsmorley]

The font is Trebuchet MS, an example, the zeros become more round rather than oblong like they used to be. Disabling D2D resolves this as well as reduces the harsh contrast.

I'd like to see screenshots of the difference.

Having said that though, there is no doubt that not everyone is going to love the way fonts look in Direct2D. I don't understand it myself, as the quality is just orders of magnitude better than with GDI+, but that is not a fight any of us are interested in having. That is why we have made the choice of using D2D "opt-out", on a global or skin-by-skin basis.

However, what we don't want to do is make it the choice of a skin "author" when distributing a skin. The choice is by design always under the control of the "end-user". If you create a Layout with UseD2D=0 set in the config sections of the skin, we simply remove that when the .rmskin is installed. We want the control of D2D to be a choice the end-user makes.

P.S. Just a word about the future. We have hopes to add a lot of new functionality related to strings and images sometime reasonably soon. They are only going to be able to be supported in D2D. The point of this is that in the future there will be skins that just won't work right at all if you don't have a system that supports D2D, and leave it turned on, at least globally.

We will continue to look at ways to give more flexibility in how D2D rendered strings look, and there are things you can do today, (don't use StringStyle=Bold where you might have in GDI+, as it often just isn't needed, reduce the brightness of your colors a tad, things like that) but there will come a time when we are just going to leave XP and GDI+ behind as we continue to evolve.

[Frostschaden]

Thanks for the reply,

Here is the image

Just as a side note, you can manually place "UseD2D=0" under each skin section of "Rainmeter.ini". This is actually where the setting on the context menu gets saved. I personally find it easier to use the context menu myself. We may add a checkbox in the Manage dialog in the future, but we really haven't discussed that yet.

-Brian

So for example if I distribute my layout with D2D=0 under each skin, if they decide not to apply the layout, rather manually enable a skin themselves, will D2D=0 still be applied?

Here are the screens
For D2D I used AccurateText=1