Comments on: Font rendering philosophies of Windows & Mac OS X

By: What Should I Look For In a UI Typeface? | designbyIZO

What Should I Look For In a UI Typeface? | designbyIZO — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:50:18 +0000

[...] an important and large topic it could very well take up a post of its own! But there are already plenty of excellent posts out there that discuss this topic, that I don’t feel the need to add to [...]

By: Zack Weinberg: Legibility of embedded Web fonts | Firefox Latest News

Zack Weinberg: Legibility of embedded Web fonts | Firefox Latest News — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:48:37 +0000

[...] of exactly what the difference is, see these blog posts from 2007: Respecting The Pixel Grid, Font rendering philosophies of Windows & Mac OS X, Texts Rasterization Exposures). People argue, loudly, about which choice is better (as the above [...]

By: Xpertd Logos

Xpertd Logos — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:52:48 +0000

BTW, the windows screenshot (on the left) seems to be from Wordpad.
The (line) seems to be much straighter in Word 2007, perhaps Word is tweaking Cleartype or font hinting itself.

By: Doug Aghassi

Doug Aghassi — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 07:05:05 +0000

Great article, and most of the comments are by people who seem to “get it” when it comes to understanding and appreciating the Mac OS X way of font rendering.

I just finished an writing an article that extensively covers Mac vs Windows font rendering if you are still looking for more information even after reading this wonderful article and the sensible replies.

http://dougitdesign.com/blogs/blog_3_6_09_Safari-4.0-web-browser-on-Windows-and-the-Differing-font-rendering-philosophies-between-the-Mac-OS-X-and-Microsoft.html

By: Font-size rendering issues between OS X and Windows « AndyStratton.com

Font-size rendering issues between OS X and Windows « AndyStratton.com — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:03:59 +0000

[...] from Photoshop and OS X. They are rendering the fonts at a smaller aggregate width. I found another post about font rendering philosophies. Apparently, Windows does not use a linear method of scaling the [...]

By: Thomas Jones

Thomas Jones — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:14:10 +0000

Modern Linux desktops let you pick where you want to be along this trade-off, and even have an option to do the hinting only along the vertical (not quite what the agg guys describe but based on that idea)

Unfortunately due to patents Linux font rendering does not do sub-pixel kerning (this is a large chunk of the agg article is talking about… and part of why it looks good) (Adobe CoolType does, I don’t know about ClearType and Mac).

Freetype in order to get around patents on TrueType bytecodes (only certain ones) has an autohinter so if you turn on the mode that only does hinting vertically ALL fonts will be hinted equally well (that mode only works with the autohinter).

For the MS fonts the autohinter tends not to look so good (MS fonts tend come out FAR to light, probably because they were designed to let the hinting and snapping fix that…)

By: Super Mario

Super Mario — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:47:40 +0000

For the people that say they see colored pixels around anti-aliased fonts (Clear type): do you run your LCDs at their native resolution? I’m curious. I can see the colored pixels only if I come 2 inches from the screen.

Clear type can only be turned on or off at the OS level, but for some strange reason fine tuning of the clear type settings is a web only application (Active X component that runs in the browser) available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearType/tuner/Step1.aspx

This allows you to further tweak the settings and choose the font “lighness” that looks the best to you.

By: Veejay

Veejay — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:15:38 +0000

BTW, the windows screenshot (on the left) seems to be from Wordpad.
The (line) seems to be much straighter in Word 2007, perhaps Word is tweaking Cleartype or font hinting itself.

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:42:12 +0000

Charlie this is already covered in the article:

“George thinks the philosophy idea is wrong because “What percentage of Mac users sit around all day doing nothing but pre-press work?” but as Fred points out Microsoft’s desktop-user optimised rendering ends up on images and videos all over the web, thus escaping the environment for which it was crippled.”

[)amien

By: Charlie

Charlie — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:56:26 +0000

I understand the reasoning, but a web browser seems to be the wrong place for Apple to use it.

Web browsing is an activity you perform on the computer, so fonts (and font-smoothing) that are easy on the eyes when using a computer should be the top priority. I mean, how often are you going to print out a web page and be disappointed that the font-weight is slightly different than you expected?