Color of quoted text

Running on Opera x64 12.01 SPDY (but also tested in Firefox Nightly x64 17.0a1 from 08-18-2012, Safari Windows 5.1.7 [7534.57.2], Google Chrome 21.0.1180.81 beta-m, and Internet Explorer x64 9.0.8112.16421, although the latter three exhibit no real problem) I have trouble reading quoted text, as it looks really dark upon the background color being used. I should disclose that I'm running gdipp on my system as I despise hinted font rendering and find the unhinted gdipp rendering to be much easier to read (hence why I run Opera as my main browser, as Safari's rendering of light-on-dark text is a bit too bold for my tastes, and letter spacing in Firefox, even when forced to use system rendering and thus use gdipp-rendered fonts is sub-optimal). I do wonder if those running on Mac OS X may have similar issues, as I understand font rendering to be much better than the Windows version of Safari when using anything but "Windows Standard" rendering. My girlfriend has a Macbook so perhaps next time I see her I could check to see how it renders on her system in various browsers.

Since the quotes are clearly delimited by the box around the quote, I would ask that the quoted text be brightened a little bit, possibly even to the same level as unquoted text. The fact that I run gdipp may make me a special case, but I find it really hard to read quoted text. I can provide a screenshot if necessary.

It would be easier if you could just provide a screenshot. I totally believe you that quoted text may need to be brightened a bit (no argument there!), but a screenshot would give folks a better idea. The forum will let you upload files now, BTW. :-)

All right, here you go. I added a black background around my crop for clear delimitation between my screenshot and the actual forum.

The class in question is "quotecontent".

There isn't a lot of contrast between #222244 ████ and #4B5C77 ████

Interesting. It seems to be a combination of colour profile (this would be in your system and/or video drivers), as well as use of ClearType or equivalent (which I do not use (I absolutely hate it, it makes everything look like blurry shit)).

EDIT: It seems the forum software is re-encoding the PNG (or something?! The background became BLUE!) I uploaded so the colours + depth get completely lost and it looks like total crap. So I've put the actual PNG up on my server instead.

http://jdc.koitsu.org/lj/riced.png

EDIT: Okay, nevermind. It seems Firefox is completely fucking up the display of that PNG; it looks fine in Windows when viewed with Windows Image Viewer and so on. Awesome. Just totally completely awesome. Thanks, Fireshit! So download the PNG and view it locally instead.

If you're not familiar with it, gdipp is a set of services (both 32-bit and 64-bit) that replaces the standard Windows GDI font rendering with unhinted (and thus subpixel antialiased) rendering. I find it much easier to read than Microsoft's method of hammering type to the pixel grid, and much more like reading printed type. I actually used to have occasional headaches which I felt were related to hinted rendering, and those have pretty much gone away since I installed gdipp. I will say, I don't recall having any issues like this before the move (although I can't remember exactly when I installed gdipp but I'm pretty sure it was when the forum was still on Parodius).

The unhinted rendering looks like Mac screenshots. I've read that Mac OS X uses similarly weak hinting.

I've increased the brightness/contrast of the quoted text colour; I added 0x10 to each RGB value.

Old: #4b5c77
New: #5b6c87

Please let me know if it's easier to read. If it's still not enough, I can increase it more. You may need to Shift+Reload a nesdev page to pick up the changed CSS (but I can assure you it is in place + working).

It's also worth pointing out that an explicit font selection is chosen for that class / "type of text":



Hinting + ClearType + other crap like that tends to make a lot of colours look "darker" when used in some fonts, so it might be more worthwhile to change the font than keep adjusting the colour. But above all else, there is probably not going to be one setting that makes everyone happy.

I can tell the difference, and it's more readable than it was. Still a little bit dark so maybe another 0x08 or 0x10 might help but I wouldn't ask for any more than that, as I don't want to impose too much and make it too bright for everyone else (especially those like you who use aliased and hinted rendering, where it was well readable even before modification). I also have Lucida Grande installed into my Fonts folder, so that's the font that I see here, as opposed to the Trebuchet I see in your screenshot.

Thanks for the accommodation. It's those type of things that make me really value a good forum like NESdev.

Actually I don't use hinted/aliased or ClearType anything -- I run Windows XP and I turn all of that crap off. I hate the way it looks. I prefer "pixel-esque" fonts.

Sure, lemme increase it by another 8 RGB values and see what we get. Will update momentarily...

EDIT: Done.

You got it backwards - hinting is aligning all the glyphs to the pixel grid like your screenshot shows, whereas my screenshot is unhinted, and of course your text is aliased, as the "blurriness" some people see is caused by antialiasing (which is the technique of adding grayscale pixels or using subpixel rendering to smooth out the font). You wouldn't want unhinted aliased rendering, as it tends to look like ass (scroll down to the images and ignore the fact that the hinted aliased ones look like ass, they're from an old version of freetype).

Windows always renders hinted fonts without third-party software, even with ClearType turned on. The only time it renders unhinted fonts is when a font is being used that doesn't contain any hints (which sometimes happens with Web typography but all of the base system fonts used on Windows are hinted).

I will recommend that, in the future when high-DPI displays are commonplace, that you consider rethinking your stance on the matter, as unhinted antialiased fonts on a high-DPI display (like the iPod touch 4/iPhone 4/iPad 3/Retina Macbook Pro) are just as easy on the eyes as reading printed paper, and don't exhibit any blurriness at all. That being said, I won't try any further to change your stance on the issue as both schools of thought are valid (and in fact, I do sometimes have a soft spot for the fonts as you see them, takes me back to my early Windows days running 95/98, as I stuck with the Amiga until 1995 which didn't have any sort of hinting or antialiasing on outline fonts, and primarily used bitmap fonts which were hand-tuned per pixel).

I see the change with the 0x08-level increase. I'm happy with the result (and I checked the result in IE just to see how it would look for a large portion of the members, and it doesn't seem too bright to be a bother in my opinion). Thank you very much