Roku Developer Program

[twarner]

Has anyone seen strange font rendering in a SceneGraph app? Some letters look bolder compared to others. In addition, the inter-letter spacing seems off. We are using the same font in an roImageCanvas app and do not see the same effect.

Here is a screenshot from our test Roku SceneGraph app: https://s3.amazonaws.com/calkinsdigital.com/images/firetv.png

[EnTerr]

Laugh at me but i don't see it?
I opened both images in two-tab browser window and switched repeatedly with ctrl-tab. Yes, there are differences but i saw no obvious kerning issue. Maybe highlight problem spots or something?

[monkeysource]

Hi twarner,

Yes, I was just looking to post about the same issue. To me the kerning logic is off and I see no way to set it. 

We use custom fonts and are having real issues with letter spacing. I've searched for ways to adjust the kerning option (metric, optical, etc) but no luck. 

If anyone has any ideas I'd be grateful too.

Thanks,

Ryan

[monkeysource]

BTW what font are you using? I get the same effects you do, most noticeably when using HelveticaCondensed. 

"Wa" letter spacing seems too close, but the "We" it seems too far in your screenshots, making it unpleasant to read. It's as if the kerning tables for letter pairs is not great. And as far as I can see it's a Roku issue as the same font on other devices looks good, and it's clear that's the same for you too. 

Out of interest, have you tried the system fonts to see if they suffer the same issues? 

[twarner]

We used Lato family. The odd thing was, we've used this same font with the roImageCanvas component and it looked fine. You can see this in an app called WochIt. The whole thing was built using roImageCanvas which is slow and clunky. We wanted to re-do it with SceneGraph SDK.

 I think Roku has some issues with their font rendering engine in ScreneGraph. I'm glad it is not just me. 

[EnTerr]

Shot i the dark but... anything to do with this?

"Wikipedia/FreeType" wrote:
Patent conflicts
In 1999 the Freetype project was informed by Apple Incorporated that FreeType was infringing patents related to TrueType font hinting. Following that, Freetype deactivated by default or worked around patent relating technologies. Therefore, had FreeType included with font hinting functionality disabled or degraded to avoid the issue of software patents held by Apple Inc. Since May 2010, all conflicting software patents related to font hinting expired, allowing FreeType's TrueType font hinter to be used in open source.

I am not saying the Co had turned off kerning for legal reasons.
Rather that someone compiled a library with the default setting (no font-hints)... 😉

[monkeysource]

Rather that someone compiled a library with the default setting (no font-hints).

Yes, it feels like this or something similar has happened. Let's hope Roku fix it in an update.