OpenType vs TrueType display rendering

[Vincent Thorne]

Dear Statalist,

This is a somewhat mundane issue, but it has been bugging me for some time.

I have been using custom fonts for a while and noticed a notable difference between using the OpenType vs TrueType version of the same font. Tested on multiple Windows 10 machines, I use IBM Plex (https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases/tag/v5.0.0), which is available in both formats. I've tested the behavior on both Stata 14 and 16. As the following figures show, the rendering differs widely, with TrueType performing better with sharper glyphs (e.g.,notice the "o"s and "m"s).

Why is that the case? Shouldn't the most modern standard (OpenType) perform better? Is this a Windows issue or a Stata one?

TrueType

OpenType

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Perhaps its just my eyes, but I find the OpenType text to show more crisply and legibly based on your screenshots. It looks as though the TrueType font is being vertically stretched to be forced to the same height (compare the zeroes between the two), so perhaps this is also something specific to the font choice.

In any case, I would think that font rendering is handled at a system level (Windows, in this case) and similar behaviour should be observed in any number of other text editors.