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Box drawing characters are not antialiased #6161
Description
Environment
Windows build number: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18362.592]
Windows Terminal version (if applicable): Version: 1.0.1401.0
Any other software? No.
Steps to reproduce
- Install the latest 1.x version of Windows Terminal and open a WSL terminal.
- Download and display the UTF-8 Demo Text, for an example
$ curl https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt
Expected behavior
The box drawings are properly rasterized with antialiasing in similar fashion to the rest of the text. Here is an example from Fluent Terminal using the Inconsolata font:
(Note: I'm not necessarily saying this is perfect either, but it's at least closer to what would be an acceptable and more consistent result.)
Actual behavior
The box drawing glyphs are severely aliased, unlike any other text, with visible pixel gaps in diagonal elements, and generally just look really bad. Rendered in the latest stable Windows Terminal version using the Inconsolata font (size 10pt):
This behavior is not just limited to Inconsolata, but happens with every font, and every size. Here is for an example Cascadia Mono in different sizes:
8pt
10pt
12pt
This behavior was introduced recently in the RC versions, and I assume 0.11.1333.0 in specific since it included #5743 which altered the way box drawing glyphs were handled. Prior versions had alignment issues with these glyphs that the PR aimed to fix, but at least the glyphs were still rendered nicely individually, with a similar, comparable output to what Fluent Terminal produces.
Activity
j4james commentedon May 23, 2020
I think this is will probably be covered by issue #5897.
DHowett commentedon May 25, 2020
Linking, but not closing this. Thanks.
oising commentedon Jun 7, 2020
I add that utf8 file to the repo last year some time: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/doc/reference/UTF8-torture-test.txt
oising commentedon Jun 7, 2020
It's not too bad at all with Fira Code:
j4james commentedon Jun 7, 2020
The diagonals are terrible though (U+2571, U+2572, and U+2573). These are "box drawing" characters - they're meant to connect together.
armak commentedon Jun 7, 2020
Oisin Grehan (@oising) Definitely doesn't look like that for me. This is Fira Code at 10pt:
10 remaining items
zadjii-msft commentedon Dec 21, 2020
From #8614
leduyquang753 commentedon Aug 30, 2024
With the new code-driven box-drawing character rendering feature, the rectangles are also not antialiased. This column has 8 steps and with the column width being 6 pixels here it appears there are only correspondingly 6 steps.
Not sure if this should be made a separate issue.
lhecker commentedon Nov 11, 2024
Grable are you sure you have the builtin glyph setting enabled?
lhecker commentedon Nov 11, 2024
The builtin glyphs are our solution to the problem you're having. But you're right that the rounded corners are difficult to see at 100% display scale. I'll make them larger and roughly match the way that Cascadia Mono looks like. Hopefully that should be an alright compromise for you.
lhecker commentedon Nov 11, 2024
That was unfortunately intentional. A lot of users asked us for such box glyphs that don't have aliasing ("blur") and so when I only have 1px to work with I've decided that I'd simply make it look somewhat asymmetric. Adding options to control this would be extremely easy to do though: All of the drawing is already parametric. 🙂 If you'd like us to add support for that, please feel free to file an issue for it (the description can be short).