AGS: Texts render incorrectly in some games

[tag2015]

In some games the ingame fonts appear strangely compressed and missing some pixels. This can be worked around enabling the "force text antialiasing" option which seems to fix the problem, but also adds a shadow and makes the text harder to read especially on backgrounds with similar color.

This happens with any scaler/size.

I have attached some screenshots with antialiasing disabled and enabled. These are just a sample but there are probably many others affected.

[eriktorbjorn]

I don't know for sure if it's the same bug, but there are text rendering differences in the freeware version of Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! as well. At least under Linux.

​https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/860/

[eriktorbjorn]

Another possible example is Puzzle Bots, which I bought from the Wadjet Eye Games web site. In the upstreams AGS engine:

And in ScummVM:

[tag2015]

This bugreport is a bit outdated now.
Using latest git, I noticed that the situation has improved for games using low-res fonts (such as Case Noir and Broken Windows). Now the fonts are not "crushed", there are still some missing pixels but the text is clearly readable.
On the other hand, the "force text antialiasing" option now does absolutely nothing.

For games using hires fonts, I noticed the same problems that eriktorbjorn reported on the demos of 3GEEKS and Grandma Badass, Larry Lotter and others...

[tag2015]

Similar issue reported for Willow House (https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/14133)

[windlepoons]

Similar font issue in Starship Quasar. (#14137)

[GateKeeper-Adventurer]

The same thing happens in The Samaritan Paradox too, even to the point that sometimes the texts in ScummVM are hard to read.

It should also be noted that the entire text box takes more space on screen in ScummVM, even though the text itself is smaller, which can be easily seen by looking how the words are placed on different text lines inside the text screen.

[GateKeeper-Adventurer]

I tried to see if I can make The Samaritan Paradox work better with different settings. It was a partial success. Turning the anti-aliasing off made the text readable.

But as a side effect, the most bizarre thing happened!
The protagonist closeup image that is supposed to be on the left side of the text box moved to the right side of the text box!

To make sure this wasn't a random coincidence I repeated this twice with same results.

[tag2015]

Similar issue in Gobliiins5 (copied from bugreport https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/14463):

the text and the subitles, when played over scummvm, is harder to read, because the font is thicker (pic1), as with standalone (pic2) without scummvm. i have uploaded 2 pictures for comparison.
https://bugs.scummvm.org/attachment/ticket/14463/pic1.jpg
https://bugs.scummvm.org/attachment/ticket/14463/pic2.jpg