Apple's font rendering vs. Microsoft's - why do Windows users dislike Safari's fonts? | Hacker News Reader

Apple's font rendering vs. Microsoft's - why do Windows users dislike Safari's fonts?

joelonsoftware.com

18 pointsSam_Odio5 comments

What Joel doesn't get (or at the very least 'forgot' to write down) is that as the pixel density of the screens (DPI) increases, MS's method will fall apart. Apple's tech is clearly superior in that respect. Just look at the iPhone... it has a "huge" (by today's LCD standards anyway) pixel density and Apple's font rendering looks really amazing.

I don't see why. Could you elaborate? Won't they both look good with higher DPI?

He's pointing out that the Windows algorithm uses a lot of tricks to compensate for the low resolution of screens compared to paper. As screens approach the crispness of paper, those tricks will become pointless distortions. In a roughly similar way, fonts designed to come through clearly in faxes tend to look dumbed-down in print.

There's another issue here which I haven't seen mentioned -- OS X assumes, by default, that displays have a gamma of 1.8, while 2.2 is traditional on Windows. For everyday non-graphics work, the difference is lost in the varition between monitors, but it will tend to make Windows antialiasing look slightly too heavy on Macs and vice-versa. (Once I noticed it, it was easy to spot screenshots of ClearType on my Mac LCD -- it's too colorful and "sparkly" compared to the system antialiasing.) If Apple didn't account for this, it may add to the confusion.

I don't use the computer all the day in the same position. That is, sometimes I'm close to the screen, and sometimes I'm far from it.

So, when I'm close to the screen I prefer Windows fonts. They look sharper and Apple ones look blurry.

When I'm far from the screen suddenly everything changes. Apple fonts look so much better, while Windows fonts look thin and weak.

So with enough distance Apple fonts will always win. It all depends on how you use your computer.

Joel doesn't really examine any of the down sides to sticking with the MS font renderer. It might cause problems with Safari internals, since various DOM components and style attributes will depend on font sizes and spacing. It might add to the annoyance of web development, since Safari on Windows wouldn't do the same thing as Safari on Mac. However, I suspect they had to work around tons of similar issues, anyway.

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