I'm trying to make VS Code editor to look exactly like Visual Studio. I made sure the font settings are exactly the same, however text still renders differently in VS Code (it seems "lighter").
Is there any way to fix this issue?
In the image below the top text is copied from Visual Studio while the bottom one is copied from VS code.
I know the difference is subtle but is still pretty noticeable.
Font rendering in VSCode has been a reoccurring issue throughout a good portion of the editors life time. Font rendering, especially in portable GUI's, is affected by several different layers, for example:
Your Graphics Card can affect the way font is rendered (you can try adjusting the graphic cards settings manually).
Your Monitor, obviously, affects rendering. In fact your monitor has a huge impact. (Try playing with your Monitor's Settings)
The color settings that are offered by your OS may have an impact (often times the color settings are the same as the graphic card settings though. Which means you can just use your OS's GUI to adjust your cards settings in some cases (Not on Ubuntu though))_
Somethings are out of your control, like:
VSCode, it is written using Electron v6. Not only does Electron impact font rendering, but when VSCode switched it Version 6 a lot of people reported a decrease in the editors font rendering quality.
VSCode also implements Anti-Aliasing tools, but as far as I can tell, they auto configure, so you have no control over this. These tools are likely to be one of the biggest causes to the difference in rendering you see, between VS IDE & VS CODE. There is a tool however that may give you some control over the Visual Studio side of rendering that I share a link to below. And just as an FYI, the Anti-Aliasing that VSCode uses is called Sub-pixel Rendering, which is something that Visual Studio doesn't implement as far as I can tell.
The Area You Have the Most Control in:
There is ONE tool/thing that you have 100% control over, that also greatly affects font-rendering, and that is the font that you decide to use. When choosing a font, you have the choice of equipping an OTF, or a TTF. In my personal experience, OTF's render better 90% of the time. The difference is in how they are created.
TTF fonts are made using quadratic Beziers.
OTF fonts are made using cubic Beziers.
Links above are the same
Fonts use something called font-hinting
Font hinting. Essentially font-hinting is a list of instructions that dynamically changes the way a font is rendered, by using the rasterized grid background as a parameter. adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. Choosing a quality font equipped with good hinting is critical for non-blurry readable text.
Many people choose font because like the way they look, or the italic version of the font they use is popular. When choosing a font, it is extremely important to choose, not the coolest one, but the one that renders with the highest quality, and is the easiest for you to read.
Well Rendering Fonts:
Not only are their fonts that render well, with ligature support, but the best rendering fonts are always free IMO. Bellow are Fonts that use font hinting and have top notch rendering abilities.
JetBrains Mono (JetBrain's Font & My Personal Favorite)
Cascadia Code (Microsoft's Programming Font from 2019)
Fira Code (Not that old, but not that new either. Is loved by many.)
Fira Mono (No Ligatures, Different Font than Fira Code)
Consolas (A classic)
Menlo (Another Classic)
The top 4 are at the top of the list because they receive updates ever few months. I don't think Menlo & Consolas receive regular updates, but they aren't left forgotten either, the are updated every year or two.
To finish with as solid of an answer as I can provide:
_"Getting VSCode to render like the Visual Studio IDE, is not something that you will probably get, with 100% satisfaction, getting an exact match with all of the different factors is just an extremely and possibly impossible thing to due. You can probably make the way the two pieces of software render, more a like, not in functionality, but in looks. It would probably help a great deal to make sure that everything that affects rendering is up to date, editor, IDE, fonts, tools, ect... From their you can try different versions, and see if maybe an older version of VSCode rendered in a way that is preferable to you. You should also play with your monitors settings. I have found that I can accomplish a great deal just through the buttons under the face of my monitor. Check Visual Studio for any rendering settings it might have, VSCode doesn't have much available, but maybe Visual Studio IDE does (I haven't used the IDE in 5 years so IDK if it does).
On a final note:
Their is one tool that could help you, I haven't used it, because it isn't for VSCode, it's for Visual Studio, but it might give you more control than you have now. The tool is called..."_
Text Sharp (Click Here to see it in the VS Market Place)
does anybody know how to render these emoticons in Windows given the unicode charcode?
It looks like this icons or font are native to apple (as sayed here) but I don't know which one I can choose to render these glyphs in Windows
Thanks
If whatever you're using to display your text is working correctly and the user has a suitable font installed, then you don't need to do anything. Font substitution will take care of that and choose a font that contains glyphs for those characters.
Windows since 8.1 ships with Segoe UI Emoji, however, if you absolutely need a font to specify explicitly.
Is it possible to turn off "font-hinting" on Windows via javascript or any other client side code?
I want browsers on Windows to mimic fonts the way they look on Mac - because I'm using an HTML-to-PDF tool (PrinceXML) which I think is the best in the market so far but it renders fonts like a Mac. So what's happening is that Windows users will create HTML-based designs which will then get rendered by the PDF conversion tool. But the fonts will look different on the PDF than what they did in the Windows-based browser - I want them to look the same.
Any workaround for this?
I'm not sure what you mean by "renders fonts like a Mac", but Prince documentation says it uses Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New, and gives instructions on how to change this.
I have an application that generates barcode in image format and it is read by some devices and fails in others.
The problem now that the barcode image is pixilated so the barcode reader can't read it and i have decided to change barcode from image to font to overcome this problem as font barcode is readable from all readers (that I am using).
I face now a problem, when I setup the driver of the printer (Zebra TLP) at my PC (64-bit) and set it as a default printer, the font Code128 appeared in fonts list at MS Office Word application but in VS2010 doesn't appear, I need to use the font of the printer (Code128) to use it and generate barcode. How can I do that?
I don't know if the problem is clear to you or not? But I have to generate a font barcode in .net 2010 at Telerik reports.
I downloaded a code128 true type font here and have used it in a few apps since. This page also gave good data for computing checksums for code128.
I'm now learning iPhone development with Monotouch and use Mono Develop for IDE. Everything works fine and I'm going to buy a license for MonoTouch. However, the IDE can not display Thai text correctly.
It just display [] that is difficult for me to type message in Thai. Although this text display correct in runtime (iPhone Simulator).
I think this problem occurs in MonoDevelop.
Please could you help me to solve this problem.
PS. I tried everything that I can do. For example, change file format to UTF 8 , 16 and copy text from other programs that display Thai text correctly.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you
Theeranit
Unfortunately, the library that MonoDevelop uses for font rendering on Mac, called Pango, has problems with font fallbacks. That means that if the primary font doen't contain the character you want, it can't fall back to another font for that character.
You can work around this by setting a custom font in MonoDevelop preferences. Set it to a font that contains Thai characters.