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Figma should provide the ability to preview a font usage (in a frame, etc, this should be configurable the same way that pixel preview is) with subpixel font rendering (perhaps OS dependent unless something can be done to make an agnostic subpixel rendering system embedded into WebAssembly - which can be derived from existing solutions) rather than the grayscale preview that we currently get in general, or with pixel preview, exporting to a bitmap/raster, etc.


This would be useful for previews and bitmap exports for demonstrations, as it would allow for font rendering to be WYSIWYG. Subpixel font rendering often isn’t just a handy thing that is done by many renderers to boost readability, sometimes it is required for readability, and in common programs such as Windows File Explorer, with a font size of 12px and Segoe UI, this text:


image


would already be very hard to read for certain viewers at 100%. This is not even a small example in comparison to the 9px subscript texts you see quite often, usually with text reading “NEW”, etc. When something is being designed for a low pixel density display (majority of computer monitors), it is very important that we can, at design time, verify that things look good (perhaps not correct, as it would be hard to make this platform agnostic due to font hinting and other things - but at least to help assure people that, yes, 12px text here makes sense, maybe don’t size up past 14px for body text here, etc).

Hey there, thanks for the feedback!


We’ll pass this onto the team for future consideration.


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