Thinkpads Forum

Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy.

- Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
- Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Read more here, http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

So my question to you,
What kind of font rendering do you prefer?
I find Windows, without ClearType supreme, and it's my number one choice.

Nice poll. Actually the font rendering is the issue annoying me most with OSX. Even on my 1400x1050 display Leopard fonts look somewhat blurry compared to XP and even blurrier compared to Vista (which has IMHO a very pleasing font rendering, although it might smash the font designers intentions).

But when switching Leopards font smooting to the lowest setting, I can get along with the fonts - at least on the built in display. When using an external display (1600x1050) fonts in OSX just look ugly for me. I've got the feeling that OSX font rendering plays its strengths on high DPI displays. But on common screens Vista and even XP is superior (related to smoothness).

Interesting read, I prefer I think OS X looking fonts, here's how I set up my fonts in Fedora Linux:

http://omploader.org/vMWc4Nw

In OS X and Windows I try to get my fonts looking like that, a little bit of blurry. Cleartype fonts also look alright, but that is how I prefer them to look.

Interesting Dialogue

I've always thought that criticisms of OSX font rendering that focus on things like "blurry" or "pixel" totally miss the point. When we read, we don't read individual letters-- we read words, and respecting the shapes of letters and ligatures leads to better overall word-shapes which are ultimately more readable.

Yes, windows XP fonts are optimized to render individual letters with ultra crisp pixel boundaries. What does this get you? Fonts that are only accurate at a very narrow range of sizes, misshapen words, and a bunch of editorials that take giant blow-up images of individual characters and then make the claim that since mac fonts are "blurry" they are therefore "worse". As if that is somehow a decent way of assessing legibility!

I haven't used Vista so I haven't seen its new font rendering yet. From what I hear, it sounds like an excellent improvement.

But if letters were displayed correctly that would mean that the word should be printed correctly too. It takes someone like Microsoft to mess that up.