Dark Text on Light Background is Rendered Weirdly

[SnoutBug]

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Describe the bug / provide steps to reproduce it

I wondered why all light themes look terrible in Zed. They look washed out, and in general have less contrast than their dark theme counter-part. I looked around in other editors and found that the fonts in zed seem to be rendered differently compared to elsewhere on my system.
The issue is best shown by the screenshots below.

Environment

System Details Report

## Report details
- **Date generated:**                              2024-10-11 23:12:17
## Hardware Information:
- **Hardware Model:**                              Micro-Star International Co., Ltd MS-7B86
- **Memory:**                                      16,0 GiB
- **Processor:**                                   AMD Ryzen™ 5 2600 × 12
- **Graphics:**                                    AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XT
## Software Information:
- **OS Name:**                                     Fedora Linux 40 (Workstation Edition)
- **OS Type:**                                     64-bit
- **GNOME Version:**                               46
- **Windowing System:**                            Wayland
- **Kernel Version:**                              Linux 6.10.12-200.fc40.x86_64

Zed system specs

Zed: v0.156.1 (Zed)
OS: Linux Wayland fedora 40
Memory: 15.5 GiB
Architecture: x86_64
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT (RADV NAVI31) || radv || Mesa 24.1.7

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help explain present your vision of the feature

Zed	Gnome Editor

Both Zed and the Gnome Editor use the same color scheme for dark and light mode. Notice how the light scheme in Zed looks drastically different (font appears thinner, more washed out and has seems to have less contrast) to the light theme in the Gnome Editor, or even the dark theme in Zed.

If applicable, attach your Zed.log file to this issue.

Zed.log

[notpeter]

This is similar to:

• Font looks squeezed in #16401 (comment)

Can you see if the workaround suggested there improve things?

Also please paste your zed environment info into the description. (ctrl-shift-p, "zed: copy system specs to clipboard")

[SnoutBug]

The issue itself does not seem to be related, though it seems yioannides has had the same issue I face. The mentioned fix with the environment variables did not help, however. Changing the font itself also did not work.

[yioannides]

Yeah, the environment variable trick improves some of GNOME-wide aliasing issues, but Zed (literally) renders the font "wrong" in dark mode and I think it also affects both UI and monospace fonts used in Zed.

[yioannides]

UPDATE: While working on another unrelated issue, I removed the TTF version of Jetbrains and installed the OTF version instead, and the font surprisingly renders correctly:

[SnoutBug]

Interestingly this did not help in my case. The light theme font still looks way thinner than the dark theme counterpart.
For me a workaround would be to increase the font-weight for the light theme by 100 relative to the corresponding dark theme.

[nirfse]

I experience the same issue on Arch Linux with SwayWM, and zed-preview-bin with any monospace font (ttf-jetbrains-mono in my case). Dark mode themes have somewhat contrast font rendering, while light themes produce thin squishy font lines, as if there's some anti-aliasing or char thickness rendering issue. Manually increasing buffer_font_weight adds some contrast, but font rendering is still very off (OP's screenshots are on point).

[meocoder31099]

This is an issue that prevents me from using Zed for my daily work. The text display on Zed is very poor compared to other text editing tools. I believe that having a good text display is an important aspect that should be prioritized in any text editor. It's unfortunate that this problem has persisted for a long time and has not been addressed.

[scottpashley]

I'm using the JetBrains mono fonts, I removed them all and then re-installed only the Semibold variant, which is what I use everywhere anyway. I went with the OTF version as suggested by @yioannides and now it looks as it should.

Edit: after a while using this, "looks as it should" probably isn't quite accurate. It does look better, but actually, the same config with a dark theme does still look better somehow (the font appears slightly bolder)

[rijenkii]

Same issue still exists, makes zed basically unusable for me:

specs

Zed: v0.163.2 (Zed)
OS: Linux Wayland fedora 41
Memory: 30.7 GiB
Architecture: x86_64
GPU: AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RENOIR) || radv || Mesa 24.2.6

[donjan]

Related to #13564 and #14175, it's just more noticeable on light backgrounds.
(might get fixed with #13951, but that one doesn't seem to be progressing much lately)

[iamnbutler]

@as-cii has an experimental PR up for this – if someone who is familiar with running zed from source wants to try checking out this PR and see if it helps that could help us make some decisions around if it makes sense to merge it or not.

PR: #20506

[rijenkii]

Are you sure that PR will affect this issue? PR mentions specifically macOS in the title, but OP (and me) are running linux wayland.

[iamnbutler]

Hmm... I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics of our text system to know if that PR will impact linux or not. I'll let @as-cii chime in.