Spinel Antialiasing — Spinel vs. Chrome

In this example, the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal has been converted to an SVG file and rendered in both Spinel and the Chrome browser on Windows 10.

The two captures have reasonably similar output but why are the glyphs darker than in the previous post?

The answer is that Chrome’s SVG rasterizer is not gamma correcting its linear output which, in this case, is almost entirely grayscale letter forms. The result is that partially covered pixels are darker than they should be.

The Spinel pipeline has sRGB correction switched off in order to more closely match Chrome.

Spinel:

Chrome:

As at least one researcher has pointed out, users often prefer the uncorrected but higher contrast letter forms over gamma-correct output. It’s hard to disagree since most of us are used to this behavior.

So can Spinel antialias small text so that it is even more legible? Stay tuned!