Author Topic: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code  (Read 23757 times)

Matthew

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #15 on: August 16, 2012, 08:19:30 PM »
Update:
I've now got another build available that fixes the scrolling crash when Retina support is turned on. There's now an On/Off toggle in the Options under Appearance > Advanced that controls this. I'll be sending you the link via private message.

If anyone else with a Retina display Mac is reading this and you want to test an experimental build, please let me know and I'll e-mail you a link.

fphillip

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #16 on: August 16, 2012, 08:58:48 PM »
Hello,

I'm using 17.02 on a Macbook Pro with Retina Display.  I also have the same problem where the code window is fuzzy.  I googled and found this thread.  If you can please provide a fix, it would be very nice.

Thanks,

Frank

jbhurst

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #17 on: August 16, 2012, 11:57:26 PM »
Hello.

I tried the new build just now and it looks great!

Thanks for helping with this.

John Hurst

fphillip

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #18 on: August 17, 2012, 12:30:01 AM »
Great news!  Can someone help me get the new build?

Frank

TKasparek

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #19 on: August 20, 2012, 07:28:10 PM »
Update:
I've now got another build available that fixes the scrolling crash when Retina support is turned on. There's now an On/Off toggle in the Options under Appearance > Advanced that controls this. I'll be sending you the link via private message.

If anyone else with a Retina display Mac is reading this and you want to test an experimental build, please let me know and I'll e-mail you a link.

Hey Matthew,
I have a retina mac and would like to help test the experimental build.
Thanks,
~Tom.

Liberty

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #20 on: September 13, 2012, 03:35:28 PM »
When will this build be released? The fuzzy fonts make Slickedit very annoying to use.

For settings and configuration dialogs, the font choice is pretty small compared to other OS X programs, and this make them a bit hard to read when used at the highest scaled resolution on the Retina MacBook. This is in in stark contrast to the icon sizes used for the toolbar, which are relatively huge.

These dialogs also have quite a few buttons with painting problems, where it seems that some gray background is painted in front of the buttons, causing the buttons to look cut off at the bottom.

I also have the impression that scrolling text is not very smooth in an editor window.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2012, 03:39:59 PM by Liberty »

Matthew

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #21 on: September 13, 2012, 03:58:05 PM »
@Liberty:
I have sent you a separate message with the download link.

As far as drawing artifacts around buttons and other UI elements, this could be due to the font and point size being used for UI elements. Go to the Tools > Options dialog, and navigate to the Appearance > Fonts section. (It'll take a few seconds to load as it indexes your available fonts). In the "Element" drop-down of the Fonts page, select "Dialog". My setting on a 2560x1440 iMac display is to use Lucida Grande, 12 point. You may need to tweak that font setting.

Scrolling performance can be affected by a couple things. The most common "worst case scenarios" for scrolling performance are
1) Large files with complex color coding being scrolled by using the arrow keys at the bottom of the file
2) Having multiple non-maximized (meaning tiled or cascaded) source files open. Overlapping source windows generate a lot of paint messages.
3) Active background tagging jobs, where a large project is being retagged or the C++ compiler headers and/or Mac Frameworks are being tagged for the first time. This uses a lot of CPU. But once the compiler directories and Mac frameworks have completed tagging, they are done until you ask them to be retagged (like when selecting a different compiler version or platform SDK version to be tagged).
« Last Edit: September 13, 2012, 04:00:34 PM by Matthew »

Liberty

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #22 on: September 13, 2012, 06:35:00 PM »
Matthew,

Thank you for the build, I have now checked it out, and the painting issues in the dialogs disappeared once I had Retina support enabled.

The difference in font quality is like night and day, they are now crisp and beautiful.

Scrolling works reasonably well when you use the scroll bars, but when you use the trackpad, it becomes very jerky, and even worse when you have multiple other windows open. I believe the best way to get smooth scrolling is using the graphics card: draw / update individual lines into bitmaps, and then use the GPU to compose and scroll them. Ideally you should have a 60fps update rate for smooth scrolling, and this is difficult to achieve without the GPU.

Moving around with the cursor is also quite slow once you have more than one window showing, it can take up to half a second to move to the next line :(. It seems that you are redrawing every window from scratch, instead of reusing what is already rendered in the other windows. On a Retina Mac you have at least 8 GB of RAM, it would be perfectly fine to use some of it to cache an image of all the other windows apart from the currently active one to speed things up.

Matthew

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #23 on: September 13, 2012, 06:44:52 PM »
Glad the update works for you. We are always looking into improving the graphics performance, but we're up against a bit of a wall on the Mac. That wall is a torrent of paint messages whenever you have overlapping editor windows. We've tried so many variants of clipping exclusion regions and the like to no avail. We are planning to have a re-engineered MDI window architecture in SE 2013 (for all our platforms), and we hope that having more direct control over that architecture will allow us to improve upon the extraneous painting we have to do on Mac.

I had to grin when I read
Quote
draw / update individual lines into bitmaps, and then use the GPU to compose and scroll them
That's exactly what we implemented to improve the scrolling in the harsh light of all those paint messages. Alas, that approach doesn't play nicely with the Retina display since the Core Text framework cannot do its Retina-specific magic to scale the font rendering properly once you've wrapped it up in a bitmap.

Liberty

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #24 on: September 14, 2012, 11:15:29 AM »
Matthew,

This must be very frustrating for you, putting in so much work and still not achieving the smoothness you want to see :( I hope the new architecture will enable you to resolve this issue.

Do you keep the display cache on the GPU as textures? Or does the CPU combine the bitmaps, and then pushes the result out to the GPU?

What I find strange is that the folder window in the file sidebar scrolls quite smoothly, even when I maximise it to use half of the display. What are you doing differently there?

jbhurst

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #25 on: September 25, 2012, 09:38:03 PM »
Weird. It seems I'm back to fuzzy fonts. I upgraded to OSX 10.8.2. Is it possible this broke something?

Anyone else on 10.8.2 with Retina display? How are your fonts with the special build?

John Hurst

Matthew

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #26 on: September 26, 2012, 02:07:41 PM »
@jb
First thing is to make sure the "Retina Display Support" value is still set properly in your options. You could also try toggling it to off to see if Apple broke our "direct draw" approach and added support for the "intermediate bitmap" approach in this update.

And this is probably barking up the wrong tree, but you could also experiment with explicitly specifying the Qt graphics system back end. You do this on the command line by invoking vs directly. Here are the possible settings.

/Applications/SlickEdit2012.app/Contents/MacOS/vs -graphicssytem=raster
/Applications/SlickEdit2012.app/Contents/MacOS/vs -graphicssytem=opengl
/Applications/SlickEdit2012.app/Contents/MacOS/vs -graphicssytem=native  (redundant, this is the default)

jbhurst

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #27 on: September 28, 2012, 03:52:33 AM »
Thank you Matthew, you are my #1 hero today.

It was as simple as the Retina Display Support check box. I don't even recall seeing that option before. Did I have to set it previously? If so I'm going senile.

Display looking good again!

John Hurst

Matthew

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #28 on: September 28, 2012, 01:33:42 PM »
That whooshing sound you hear is my sigh of relief.

We added the checkbox for the option in the third experimental build. First two builds hardcoded the retina display support to ON.

mesh2011

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Re: Fonts on Macbook Pro Retina Display = Fuzzy source code
« Reply #29 on: October 11, 2012, 04:41:59 PM »
Just downloaded a trial and have hit this issue as well.

When will the source code display for mac pro retina be fixed/released?  I would like to purchase for Mac, but would like to know when this will be released.