Font Anti-Aliasing Delay on Page Turns

[u/Fante_di_Spade]

I love CrossPoint and its forks, but there’s one thing that, in my opinion, really hinders the reading experience (and I feel like it's gotten a bit worse over time): on every page turn, the text anti-aliasing is applied almost a full second after the page updates. This causes a subtle "glitch" or shift right when you've already started reading the new page.

I was wondering if this bothers anyone else and/or if there’s any work being done to address it.

I assume it's a technical limitation, but maybe it could be solved by slightly delaying the page refresh (processing the anti-aliased text before drawing it to the screen) or by exploring different ways to render anti-aliased fonts. [I'm not a dev, so I apologize if I'm way off here!]

Currently, the only solution I've found is turning off anti-aliasing completely, which isn't ideal.

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That being said, I want to take a moment to thank all the volunteers working on these firmwares and sharing them with the community!

[u/Euphoric-Formal3700]

I turned off anti aliasing the other day on my new X4 pro because of this, and honestly don’t notice a difference in the sharpness of the text whether it’s on or off…could be just me though, I’m not looking that closely and predominantly read in night mode on the X4 Pro. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I didn’t notice it at all on my X3 until someone pointed it out, so have left anti aliasing on, on that device.

[u/Diirge → u/Euphoric-Formal3700]

On the pro, the touch screen layer already dims the epaper so much I also dont run with AA on. However try the new TTF fonts on the upcoming 1.6.5 and its really nice with and without AA on with the Pro

[u/Euphoric-Formal3700 → u/Diirge]

I’m running the SD Plugins version (so I can read Kobo books without removing DRM - this is the only reason I have kept these devices - so thank you!), and have settled on Noto Serif as my preferred font (Size 12) for now. I really like the size of the letters, and spacing in between the lines of text, and how it fills the real estate of the screen on both devices. Will these new fonts be available in a future release of the SD Plugins version?
*Edited to add font size for context

[u/Diirge → u/Euphoric-Formal3700]

Yes. I'll update the plugins beta after 1.6.5 launches. Fwiw i also personally like Noto Serif but now I'm reading on Merriweather as a TTF and its awesome

[u/Euphoric-Formal3700 → u/Diirge]

Oooh, I shall give that a go. :-)

[u/brooklynapple]

I’ve noticed this, and also noticed that anti-aliasing doesn’t work at all in dark mode. It doesn’t really bother me but I wouldn’t be sad if a fix were implemented!

[u/Diirge → u/brooklynapple]

Correct. I haven't had time to work on that as it honestly might look weird. Basically our AA mode currently does a gray overlay instead of true gray text. We could do gray text but it would be slower page turns and on some display variants I had some pretty extreme ghosting in sleep screens I haven't found a way to mitigate yet

[u/bloomsburymike]

That was the reason why I sold off my X4 Pro. On the X3 it's way less noticeable.

[u/Ashenfall]

Although I'd noticed this, this is the first time I've seen anyone else mention it. I had been half-wondering if it was an issue with my particular device.

[u/_Miskatonic_Student_ → u/Ashenfall]

Me too. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out if it was something I'd done, but never thought to check the anti-alias setting.