Surge XT Font rendering issues for slider labels and routing bar on Windows

[VincyZed]

Surge XT on the left and 1.9 on the right.

I think that in 1.9 the font used on Windows changes from 130 something % zoom level to that clearer font on the right. However, it doesn't on XT, and it looks a bit more pixelated (and a bit harder to read to a certain extent).

We've discussed this over on Discord a couple of days ago. Here's the first message's link:
https://discord.com/channels/744319641211633774/744324663383031821/874758651448029215

[mkruselj]

Yeah JUCE font renderer is just different. It might be a live with it.

[baconpaul]

So now I know why I didn't see this

Here's mac XT v 1.9 side by side VSTGUI vs Juce at 150%

[baconpaul]

XT dies look a smidge smaller though. When I copy "Sync" from XT over to 1.9 with preview and line up the lines I see this:

So I wonder if "9pt lato" in vstgui uses a different size than "lato with px height 9" in juce. lemme noodle a bit.

[VincyZed]

@baconpaul So I tested with 9.5 as you requested, and at least on my side it makes 0 difference to the font size (I compared side-by-side screenshots and they're the exact same). I had to bump it to 10 to see the font increase, and now it's definitely a little too big imo:

No difference between 10 to 10.5 either. Looks like it's integer only?

[baconpaul]

Huh wow ok so windows is definitely different than mac! I’ll look into what juce is doing

thanks for trying

[baconpaul]

So in https://forum.juce.com/t/codeeditorcomponent-windows-linux-broken-6-0-8-6-1-including-in-projucer-and-demorunner/47565/19.

Find out that system fonts on win use a D2D path and ttf do not

so one solution here is probably to

1: reinstate the Lato font install in the windows installer and
2: use that system font and render path if it is installed bu5 fall back to memory if not

Mac and Linux don’t have this bifurcated path

[mkruselj]

Doing return juce::Font("Lato", size, style).withPointHeight(size); in RuntimeFont.cpp yields this (JUCE right, VSTGUI left):

So we have the font drawing to match like that.

[baconpaul]

So the fix is

install lato in the windows installer
If you can use it from os, do so
If you can’t fall back to memory

[baconpaul]

got it. pr in.