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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting read, but I just can't help but think that the tragedy lies with Microsoft and not the low resolution. It's 2011 and Apple has been doing font auto-hinting for ages, and so has been Adobe. Microsoft though still prefers to live in tragedy and defiantly clings to TrueType format and its horrendously labor-intensive manual hinting. I really don't know what's wrong with them, but for a fraction of Vista's 1bn budget they could've written a dozen of TTF auto-hinters.

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And in 2011, "live in tragedy" Microsoft can render fonts sharply, Apple can't.

I'm a Windows guy temporarily using a Mac to write an iPad app, and the main thing that bugs me about OS X is how fuzzy the fonts look. In Windows, my fonts look ultra sharp on-screen; on Mac, fonts look fuzzy. Apparently it's because of this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

But I say to Apple: unless one's monitor has the dot pitch of the iPhone "retina display", your font rendering looks really fuzzy. <rant>What good is "preserving the typeface design" if it makes your eyes water?</rant>

Apparently, this is subjective. I agree with you that OS X fonts look awful, but it's clearly a deliberate design choice, and knowing Apple, I suspect there is at least one person who thought it over and genuinely thinks their font rendering is the better choice. I can't fathom why anyone would prefer OS X fonts, but apparently people do.

The reason is rather simple - this makes all fonts on OS X look great-to-passable, while unhinted fonts on Windows look really bad and are simply unusable.

The (IMO, terrible) font rendering on Windows is actually the second biggest reason I strongly prefer OS X (the biggest reason is not relevant to this discussion.)

So yes, this is quite subjective.

Can you explain why you prefer the font rendering in OS X, or do you think it's just a matter of what you've grown used to? I think fonts in OS X look notably fuzzy, and the strokes all tend to look too bold.

On the flip side I'm an OS X (and Linux) user and I tend to think fonts on Windows look spindly and have erratic kerning.

It really is a matter of taste and what you are used to. Also because antialiasing is basically a trick of visual perception, it wouldn't surprise me if there really are differences in people's vision systems such that some people are more likely to see heavily antialiased text as blurry, similarly to the way some people are more likely to object to low framerate video or get a headache when viewing stereoscopic 3D.

I can't count the number of times people have tried to correct errors in my Visio diagrams because they see bad kerning as if I accidentally included an extra space in the middle of the word.

I recently found that one can go into Options in Visio and change font rendering so it uses gray-scale. Then the kerning is just fine.

Anecdotally, there's definitely some truth to it being a matter of what you've grown used to. I moved from an old Windows desktop to a Mac OS X laptop. I found the fonts on Mac OS X to be exactly as you described -- fuzzy, bold, fairly annoying. After a month of heavy usage, I stopped noticing it. When I visited my old Windows computer a year later, I realized I perceived all the fonts as incredibly jaggy, thin, and hard to read. But after a while (1 week) I stopped noticing as much.

I have a similar experience, but while I can get used to the blurriness, and after a while I don't notice it as much, going back is always a breath of fresh air. I imagine it like putting your glassses on - if I had to wear any - everything just aligns right. In fairness this happens on Windows as well if I have ClearType turned on, but not quite as much. Mind you the MBP has a higher dpi than my desktop monitor, and the bkurriness is still noticeable. On a different laptop that has Linux running, slightly higher dpi looks good; same with my Android phone.

No matter how long I use font aliasing, without some very high dpi my eyes just cannot adjust, cannot totally ignore the bluriness. Seems like I'm in the minority though.

> I suspect there is at least one person who thought it over and genuinely thinks their font rendering is the better choice.

Basically, the OSX font rendering is as close as they can to print, where the Windows font rendering gives primacy to on-screen font clarity. This leads to a "fuzzier" OSX look, but a much better match to the actual typeface where windows's renderer "breaks" fonts to make them "clearer".

This, of course, comes in no small part from Jobs's background in loving the written/printed word. I'm sure it's also helped by the Mac background/history in design and print.

I think it's mainly a matter of what you're used to. Each time my main computer has moved to a different font rendering tech (Aliased → ClearType → Apple) I've initially been spitting mad like you seem to be, but have ended up preferring it.

It's also a matter of what monitor you have - (at least on Linux where you can tweak it) configurations that look great on some monitors can look really bad on others

Sounds like Stockholm syndrome.

Not really, because there's no absolute ranking of the 3 to be corrupted.

As a Mac guy I have the opposite reaction. What you describe as "sharp" I see as "wrong and too thin and pixely". It is like frou_dh said that someone prefers what they are used to.

While aggressive hinting provide sharp glyph rendering it ruins precise text positioning and geometry - http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

I've got the same issue with all the Linux distros I've seen. There might be some way of fixing it... but I just end up almost never using a GUI.

Mac font rendering is more accurate (pretty) but less precise (fuzzy). Windows font rendering is more precise (sharp) but less accurate (ugly).

Comes down to taste.

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