Text rendering of Unicode text in LC

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hello all,

I’m seeing Chinese characters being rendered differently in different versions of Livecode 8 in Windows 10.

LC 8.1.3 Chinese characters are displayed appearing similarly to the 1-bit graphics of the old days—aliased simple pixels.

LC 8.1.9 renders the same characters anti-aliased. Also, for 17 point Songti SC Regular, it is 1 pixel taller, with a corresponding greater line height—the whole field is stretched vertically. Also, in-line reference images which I use as small icons are also stretched 1 pixel vertically (but not horizontally). Helvetica font displays identically in both versions.

Here’s an enlarged sample showing both:
https://spark.adobe.com/page/clCst4mdUu8Jy/ <https://spark.adobe.com/page/clCst4mdUu8Jy/>


Am I right in supposing this is a Skia issue, specifically the harfbuzz text shaping library, and that there have been updates to Skia/harfbuzz used in LC that have changed the rendering? Or, is this a LC bug that the text is correctly rendered with anti-aliasing but stretched vertically?

Our Chinese translators and publisher are distressed seeing this, as they consider the anti-aliased, “blurified" text inferior.

I’ve not seen any reference to text rendering in the LC docs.

(I’m still waiting for LC 9.0 to download to test it in that.)

Peter Bogdanoff
ArtsInteractive