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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

Other operating systems tend to snap fonts to the pixel grid where as OS X does not do that. So OS X suffers more from low-res displays in general.

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It's funny, though, now that Retina is a thing, how much superior OS X font rendering algorithm is. This was not very clear when fuzzy low res displays were the norm. Back then, I vastly preferred Microsoft 's ClearType approach. Now, it's not even a contest -- Windows does not represent fonts truthfully.

Its pretty clear that OS X has existed for what 15 years most of that time without retina screens it didn't retroactively become better because screen resolutions improved to make what was presumably an inferior algorithm in the prior context work better in the modern context.

But it did. OS X (and Mac OS before it) were optimized for fidelity with higher resolution laser prints. This necessarily caused more anti-aliasing artifacts then with pixel snapped text. It was actually less of a problem with CRT monitors where individual pixels blended better with each other.

This is not a shallow concern, pixel snapping can cause major issues like line breaks differing between print and display.

Interesting I would never have considered print publishing. That said.

Was this configurable and what percentage of users were concerned with producing print copy? In what eras?

I would but that these individuals were always a minority and the arrangement appears to be inferior for the majority of users for the majority of the time it was a factor.

This was a Steve Jobs obsession from his first calligraphy class at Reed College. Proper proportional fonts were built in with the original Macintosh - this wasn't something he was going to do a market analysis on to decide for him.

However historically this was less problematic because screens were fuzzier anyways. It was only with LCDs that the anti aliasing became obvious.

The Macintosh may have had a very small market in the 90's but one market that it did dominate was print.

Most programs are pretty horrible in 4k with win10 too.

Really? All of my dev tools support scaling.

I agree, I have had no problems (except for Eclipse, but I vowed to use Eclipse as little as possible well before I upgraded to win10+4k).

Intellij, Cygwin, Ubuntu VMs (DPI scaling worked well in vmware at least), VS Code, VS proper, sublime, idle, cmd, cmder, IDA, Tableau. I can't think of a single application (except for Eclipse) which I noticed not scaling well.

And probably none of these is Qt-based. (I'm not blaming Qt specifically, it's a great framework, simply showing why you didn't have the problems). And of course there are solutions, but I wish things worked a bit more smoothly:

RStudio on Windows (fixed now, and some workarounds) - https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/2065421...

I don't use my windows install for development so I can't comment for that. However, I'm seeing issues with Photoshop and a lot of other programs that end up very small, blurry or with their images all stretched up.

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