very poor font display quality

Don’t trust the zoom factor either. It says 100% but it computes a “technical zoom factor” taking into account the dpi. Therefore to get a 12pt on screen it may use a 15 pixels (= 15pt font). In principle, you won’t see the difference unless you count the pixels, but some fonts contain optimised bitmap variants for small sizes. Due to the technical zoom factor, an incorrect variant may be selected.

well, thanks for your energetic attempts at making my query pointless (see the pun there) but comparing similar sizes (jpeg grabs) is the best I can do to see if there is a difference between win7 and 10… but you’ve kinda discouraged the other person helping me from indulging this exercise…

I’m very sorry if I discouraged you. I only tried to warn contributors that screenshots could not reflect exactly what’s happening on screen. Due to scaling, screenshots could show unblurred character shapes while screen is blurred. Font rendering is very difficult and some problems cannot easily be described with words and pictures don’t help much because they add their own artefacts. I know this is a real issue, poisoning the peaceful use of applications and computers. There have been numerous reports with MacOS X, Windows and Linux about that. Considering the evolution of graphics base systems (e.g. X vs. Wayland), higher layers (OpenGL), font renderers and application themselves, it is surprising there are not more such reports.

Excuse me if I add a negative impact on your quest.

@gabix, thanks… actually it was the Liberation Serif which is the default font for Writer, and is problematic… I do see this not looking good on your 100% example, also Times New Roman looks ugly too… Compare these serif fonts to how they look on Google Docs (or MS Word) and you’ll see just how bad they are on Writer. I don’t understand the technical reasons why, but really wish a smart coder would fix the problem. Cheers for your input and help. To me it shows there is no difference between win 7 and 10.

no probs @ajlittoz

On liberation serif, there is quite a big difference to me… the spacing is much more even on MS word. but have a look at the new example below, I have compared writer to google docs. unfortunately there is no liberation serif in Gdocs… but you can see the relative quality difference with times new roman. I will post them now.

Hi there,

it’s funny that the bad font rendering quality of LibreOffice Writer under Windows 10 is questioned by some and has to be proven by screenshots. If someone can’t see the difference at first sight, he should go to an eye doctor. Actually everybody should notice the better font quality if they use a modern browser on the internet.

Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac or Linux to judge whether the font quality of LibreOffice in these operating systems is comparable to the good font quality of modern browsers.

Under WIndows, LibreOffice shows a very restless typeface overall. As far as I can see, the main problem is the bad “font hinting”, which controls the horizontal spacing of letters. But there might be other problems as well.

It’s even really easy to compare the font quality of LibreOffice and browsers directly if Google fonts are used. Both LibreOffice Writer as well as Google Docs can use them. And LibreOffice documents can be load into Google Docs. It is even easier with the free Windows font manager “FontBase”, which allows to temporarily install Google fonts without having to download them first manually.

The quality difference between LibreOffice Writer and modern browsers has always been explained to me by the fact that modern browsers might have their own built-in font rendering system that is independent of the operating system they run on. And the font rendering system of modern browsers isn’t optimized for speed in the first place but for quality.

Therefore I ask myself why, shouldn’t LibreOffice Writer also have it’s own operating system independent font rendering system, just like browsers do? Wouldn’t it be possible to copy the technology from the Mozilla (Firefox) browser, for example, which is also an Open Source Project?

With the currently poor font quality of LibreOffice Writer, it is hard to write longer texts without violating its own visual aesthetics. Because we spend more and more time on the Internet, switching back to LibreOffice the poorer font quality is immediately obvious. Because the majority of desktop computer users are on Windows and that won’t change anytime soon I am not very confident about the future of LibreOffice Writer.

Good luck,
mireiner

Do not answer a question unless it is a real answer.

for LINUX install GTK to smooth font
libreoffice-gtk3