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> I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print.

I strongly prefer Windows to Mac for font rendering. As you say, it's subjective. However, in today's world, the overwhelming majority of my computer use is screen-oriented. Printing accounts for a vanishingly small set of use cases for me, easily lower than 1%. And if the fonts were a few pixels off when printed, would I even notice? No. I'm not doing typesetting when I print; I'm merely creating a hardcopy of something so that I can read it when I'm not at a computer or printing a legal document to sign.

In 2019, it seems odd to prioritize print layout at the expense of screen legibility. When I use a Mac (on a normal ~100 dpi screen), the text looks softened with bad anti-aliasing and I feel like I've stepped through a time machine to the amazing year 2000.

On high-DPI displays the difference is less notable. But even there I think Windows does a better job at legibility; I find text more readable on-screen on a modern Surface than a comparable Mac laptop.

It's not about whether you're actually printing it, the print version is just an accurate reference to the correct shape of how the font is designed.

That shape doesn't necessarily line up on the pixel grid, so you can smush it around to get sharper edges on a computer screen at the expense of changing the shape/size/spacing of the font. Or you can follow the designed shape more correctly at the expense of smearing some stuff across multiple pixels.

There are pros and cons to each, and which one you prefer is where it gets subjective.

Some comparisons and discussion over here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...

The Windows text has sharper edges but it looks funny to me in comparison.

That comparison is very enlightening. The Windows version is very sharp, but the letter forms are completely distorted and it looks like it’s switching typeface as the point size changes, or even within the same sample. Look at the horizontal lines in the “z” in the larger sizes, they are very clearly too thin and don’t harmonize with the surrounding letters. Look at the relationship between the top of the “u” and “a” in “quartz”. The straight lines in the “u” serifs end at the exact same height as the curved top of the “a”, making the “u” appear, visually, to extend higher. You can clearly see in the Mac sample that there is some antialiasing on the “a” to fix this issue.

I can understand how years of Windows will make the Mac sample look fuzzy, but I’m convinced the correct and harmonious word shapes on the Mac are much more important for reading flow.

Back when Apple had Safari on Windows, I tried it out. I remember noticing the blurrier text right away, and wondered what happened. No, I wasn't imagining things, as Firefox had much sharper text. I couldn't stand it, and I stopped using it after 5 minutes.

Years later, I stumbled across Jeff Atwood's series on the topic.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-r...

Yes, I remember Safari for Windows also, and FWIW I preferred it. Of course in those days, I had CRT monitors so none of this really mattered, everything was slightly blurry anyway.

> In 2019, it seems odd to prioritize print layout at the expense of screen legibility. When I use a Mac (on a normal ~100 dpi screen), the text looks softened with bad anti-aliasing and I feel like I've stepped through a time machine to the amazing year 2000.

In 2019, what seems most odd is insisting that there is 'one best way'. The fact is that I fall into that vanishingly small base of users that notices the colors in windows fonts. I find Mac and Linux easier. I like the Retina displays. I'm not sure how you can argue against my preference for them. I did not say you should not have fonts you can read; merely that there is no one way that ought to be said to be better.

Yes, my recollection was that Apple was the first to market with vector fonts, hinting, and sub-pixel-rendering, and not by a small margin. I had to interact with their lowish-level C API that drew this stuff in the early 2000s -- it was definitely doing sub pixel rendering at a time when the competition was, uh, Windows XP.

Retina officially happened in 2013, not 2015, and I distinctly remember playing with scale factors in 2008 and being frustrated by a search for competitive panels on non-Apple laptops in 2009, so they've been pushing high resolution panels far earlier than 2015, which is exactly what you would expect from a company in the premium niche.

So yeah, OP is doing some sketchy revisionist history to dunk on Apple, but if Apple thought it was OK to release dark themes without updating SPR, hinting, etc to work on non-white backgrounds (which I suspect is the real issue here) then they do need a wakeup call.

Windows XP supported ClearType for sub-pixel rendering. It was off by default, I think because there was a slight performance impact and it didn't give good results on some older displays available at the time.

Then I'm guilty of the same thing as OP: I saw in one particular instance that XP wasn't doing SPR and assumed it wasn't capable of it. OSX was definitely doing it at the time, though, because I had to deal with a visual issue that revolved around it, and it was everywhere by default.

EDIT: Did some googling. This is a bigger, older, juicier drama than I knew. It even looks like Nathan Mhyrvold and Woz were involved!

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/...

> Cleartype was suspiciously similar to approaches developed many years earlier by researchers at Apple Computer, IBM, Xerox Corp. and elsewhere.

> Gibson decided to stake his own claim to history by creating a Web page to document what he calls the original pioneering work in sub-pixel technology by Steven Wozniak, designer of the Apple II computer.

I believe this is the site: https://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm

too strange to believe combinations of ultra-aggressive management plus occasional engineering brilliance plus team sports engineering efforts; before the Internet, paper print was one side of mass consumer applications aka the big money. People here know that super-smart father figure founder John Warnock literally burst into tears on stage as bitter rivals (MSFT AAPL) turned buddy-buddy behind closed doors to knock Adobe off of their type perch, right ?

I believe it. I haven't heard the story told from that angle yet, though.

There's a blast from the past.

I remember downloading that GRC demo to prove to a friend it should work on any laptop, not just the Mac.

I have a vague memory that SPR on Windows XP was very oddly integrated when it did arrive. You didn't download an update or utility, you went to some Microsoft page that turned it on, and tuned it for your monitor. So for most people it may as well have not existed.

>> Retina officially happened in 2013, not 2015,

2012, actually.

> This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts.

It shouldn't be _that_ extraordinary. Much of my life experience has taught me that people/groups known for a 'thing' reinforce their prestige via a sort of circular reasoning. This can cause people to gloss over frayed edges. Sometimes dubious decisions are even taken as the "right way" moving forward! If the paragon of cheese says acrid, fishy cheese is great cheese, there's probably something to it, right?

OSX, depending on the version, has an uneven margin here and there, or a weird aliased image during setup.. It's pretty clean all things considered, but Apple's reputation is a force multiplier and a floor on how their designs are appraised.

Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile.

"Courage" is an interesting way to describe those decisions. It's either that, or they're taking their reputation defense shield for granted. Eh, if cracks start to appear, they have enough money to do things right for a while.

Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile.

These are takes a lot of Apple users would, to varying degrees, agree with, so I'm not sure how "hot" they are. :) You can make a case for all of those choices, too, but despite the reputation us Apple fans seem to have, most of us just aren't going to say "I hate this, but because Apple did this, I must actually love it." In fact, we tend to be very, very vocal about things Apple does that piss us off, and most of us have a list of such things that goes back decades.

(Personally, I think removing the headphone jack is user hostile on the iPad Pro but not the phone; I think MagSafe is superior from a UX standpoint to USB-C, but USB-C has some advantages when you have USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, a test several of Apple's USB-C-only gadgets fail; and the Touch Bar is a solution in search of a problem.)

> Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression.

It's a trade-off that I'll take for having an industry standard power supply and a replaceable cable. Used to be if your power cord frayed at either the MagSafe end or the brick end you were out $80 for a replacement.

Now you can buy a 60W USB-C power delivery brick with 3 bonus USB-A charging ports for $25 and if your cable ever goes bad it's a cheap replacement from Anker or similar. And I doubt you'll ever need to replace that cable because Anker is apparently better at making them than Apple ever was.

I have one of these under my desk with cords for charging my laptop and phone/tablet: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24425 Monoprice has frequent sales for even cheaper.

Right - Apple even made a selling point out of the Quartz display rendering engine using PDF-compatible models internally (in much of a similar way that NeXT used Postscript-compatible models). It was designed specifically to enable true display-to-paper printing. No other platform comes remotely close to that yet.

But who cares about that when you’re using a computer screen and it all looks like a blurry mess?

Let’s try an analogy: most small loudspeakers are unable to get good volume without distorting the sound. You have a choice between playing music that sounds as intended but at a very soft volume, or to crank up the volume and make it sound like a noisy buzzsaw. This is analogous to the choice between type that looks like it is supposed to but a blurry mess, or type that looks sharp but has crazy pants distorted letter shapes.

Arguably there’s a place for each of these approaches. If you have an extremely low resolution screen, or underpowered speaker, it makes sense to accept the distortion to be able to use the screen/speaker at all. But if you have fairly good speakers or a high resolution screen it just doesn’t, because the volume is loud enough as it is, and the blur is actually pretty sharp.

I totally agree. Just the other day I was chatting with a friend about how I was considering getting a higher-resolution display for my PC because text rendering looks so terrible next to my iMac. He told me not to bother, because he has a higher-res PC display and it still looks bad on his desk next to his Mac.

I've been using 4k displays on my laptop and desktop for years, and they look fantastic.

It can be annoying to tweak scaling in Windows at first, but once you get the right setting, you never have to change it again. It takes about 10 min of setup (if it takes any setup at all).

Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." A 5 point font magnified to twice its size will look different than the same font at 10 points. See https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of... for a discussion. (And look in Knuth's "Metafont")

Windows handles fonts correctly. And Cleartype is an option you can turn on and off. It makes fonts look "more correct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all?

Can you disable ClearType and still get antialiased font rendering? From what I remember it's either ClearType messing the fonts up or essentially getting no smoothing at all, and a quick googling seems to confirm this.

Yes. I just turned it on and off, and I still get "antialised font rendering" but without taking advantage of sub-pixel rendering. You have to tune it based on your LCD screen geometry

> Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly."

Correct, but when printed on paper (using movable type for example), the width of left-aligned text set in the same font at a continuously increasing point size typically has a nice 'linear' slope on the ragged right edge. Cleartype does not have this. Cleartype changes the text width drastically between point sizes close in magnitude

The author criticized freetype for having a non-linear apparent font weight as the font point size is increased linearly. The author said this was bad without much justification, while simultaneously claiming cleartype is better, despite having the same issue of font metrics being discontinuous over a continuous point size.

> It makes fonts look "more correcct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all?

Not at all. Options are great. However, saying something is objectively better when in fact there are multiple use cases for which it is better and many for which it is worse is disingenuous, and that is what the author is doing.

I'm not sure what "more correct" means in this context. Coming from a MacOS background, it is my opinion that ClearType makes fonts look worse.

Regardless of my personal opinion, it's clear that other people share this opinon. For instance, Word doesn't use ClearType; they had problems with text on different colored backgrounds.[0][1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#cite_note-Word-3

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/05/31/crisp-te...

Mac on the left, Windows with cleartype on the right. Adobe InDesign

https://imgoat.com/uploads/74ad4786c3/203900.png

Also see "Microsoft Visual TrueType"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/tools/vtt/index

To me, all fonts on OS X are different shades of bold. Cannot stand it.