What every coder should know about gamma

One thing I hate is that essentially all vector graphics and text rendering (Cairo, Quartz, MS Windows, Adobe apps, ...) is done with gamma-oblivious antialiasing, which means that apparent stroke width / text color changes as you scale text up or down. This is why if you render vector graphics to a raster image at high resolution and then scale the image down (using high quality resampling), you get something that looks substantially thinner/lighter than a vector render. This causes…

Sorry to be off-topic but I dislike the "what every X should know" or "X everyone should know" headlines. Do some searching on hn.algolia.com on different variations and suddenly there is a lot of stuff that you were supposed to know about already that you most likely don't. Everyone thinks that their own favorite subject is the most important and should be mandatory reading in their broader field. I believe these headlines build unnecessary imposter syndrome and general bad feels.

This article contains some pretty major errors, which is kind of surprising to see! >The transformation used to represent the physically linear intensity data either generated synthetically via an algorithm or captured by a linear device (such as a CMOS of a digital camera or a scanner) with the discrete values of the perceptually linear scale is called gamma encoding. This isn't super correct, and it underscores the biggest issue in this article: sRGB (and its gamma encoding function) has…