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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. This makes everything appear very bold and blurry.

This almost reads like satire.

It's well-known that Windows prefers to distort letterforms for the sake of crispness, while Macs preserve letterforms for the sake of fidelity.

Saying that one is better than the other is entirely subjective -- there are many, many articles on the subject. There's absolutely nothing objective about it.

If it were so "objective", then it seems quite odd that Macs would be the predominant choice of graphic designs and type designers, who would be expected to care about this the most...

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Steve Jobs took type-faces and font rendering more seriously than anyone else in the computer industry except for maybe Donald Knuth. He discovered calligraphy while at Reed College and it changed him forever.

<aside> I am still amazed at how crappy MS Word at typesetting. I write these beautiful papers in LaTeX with incredible math type setting and then sometimes I am asked to convert to Word -- it almost makes me cry to ruin my "art" to convert it to Word. </aside>

It it an affront to my aesthetic taste to look at a Windows UI.

Not defending Windows, but I find the common latex font clumsy and hard to read.

Computer Modern is very thin. I personally prefer Computer Concrete, in a similar vein, because it is simpler and easier to read on low-DPI displays. Although I’m not sure about this, it feels as though Computer Modern was designed to take into account a bit of bleed, which is why it looks better as a high-resolution inkjet print.

Regardless of which font you use, TeX will produce a much higher quality document (esp. math) than Word, at the expense of an upfront time investment in learning to use it.

I am personally also not a big fan of Computer Modern, but I've heard graphic people praise it. It is also very easy to use a different font.

> This almost reads like satire.

After I spent a big part of my day with adjustments trying to make Windows font rendering suck less so I could get some work done, I also thought it might be satire, but it feels more like reading someone's antivaxx conspiracy theory.

I worked on an application that converts HTML to PDF and font rendering on Windows was incredibly frustrating. The kerning made text unreadable at smaller fonts. It's difficult for me to believe someone would actually prefer the way Windows does font rendering.

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