Source Sans (Pro) not rendered properly in some Windows applications about source-sans HOT 6 CLOSED

Source Sans Pro is an old version that isn’t developed further

from source-sans.

I can see SS3 performing well in the WPF test app – which app is this, BTW?

It is just a quick WPF based test application that I made in five minutes. It does nothing except displaying some text with different fonts and rendering modes.

I view this as a cosmetic issue within an edge case scenario. As such, I feel that a fix is not necessarily beneficial. I am closing this issue.

OK, I understand your reasoning. It clearly works better in Source Sans 3, with the exception of aliased rendering. We do actually use that in some of our test applications (to get text rendered the same way on different machines that have different anti-aliasing setup). But I agree that this is more of an edge case scenario.

from source-sans.

This is a bug limited to Microsoft Word’s font list. AFAICT, they do it that way for performance reasons. But it’s nothing that can be fixed from the font’s side.

from source-sans.

This is a bug limited to Microsoft Word’s font list. AFAICT, they do it that way for performance reasons. But it’s nothing that can be fixed from the font’s side.

Well, that is not the whole truth. Yes, as far as I have understood MS Word disables font anti-aliasing in the font list. But then the font should be shown without smoothing. Not with the garbled look that we see. Other fonts in the font list do not have the same problem as Source Sans Pro here, so there is something special about this font.

Also, it is not just in MS Word that Source Sans Pro does not render well. The test program that I showed a screenshot from is a simple Windows application with a WPF UI layer. There too Source Sans Pro is rendered significantly worse than any other font I have tried. Source Sans 3 works better, but also looks terrible when antialiasing is disabled. So again this indicates that there is something special about how this font is defined that Windows does not agree with.

from source-sans.

Getting fonts rasterized “like Arial” in “Display, Aliased” environment (which means b/w 1-bit rendering) is a significant effort, and basically requires drawing pixel images of every glyph, at every point size.

I don’t think there is a good reason to use aliased type today.

As @fitojb correctly said, the current version of Source Sans is Source Sans 3.
Source Sans Pro is version 2. The “Pro” suffix was dropped because it does no longer carry much meaning (“Pro” originally communicated Adobe Latin-2 character set support).

I can see SS3 performing well in the WPF test app – which app is this, BTW?

from source-sans.

I view this as a cosmetic issue within an edge case scenario. As such, I feel that a fix is not necessarily beneficial. I am closing this issue.

from source-sans.