Why does the same font look better on macOS? | Hacker News Reader

Why does the same font look better on macOS?

twitter.com

16 pointsnoleary8 comments

The explanation was a bit too technical for me to understand (without first learning a lot more about fonts and rendering).

I mostly use Windows, macOS and iOS/iPadOS (I used to use Linux many years ago). But if I were to rate font rendering on screens and “how good the fonts look”, I’d agree with the question and its assessment: for me, macOS looks significantly better than Windows, which looks somewhat better than Linux.

Another thing I’ve seen is that application developers also need to put effort on this. LibreOffice, which I use on Windows and macOS, looks awful (I still use it and donate to it). I can see how “rough” the fonts look. It’s not just LibreOffice. Applications running on Linux don’t look as good as macOS native apps either.

If Linux in general focused more on how good the fonts and UI look (like elementary OS), it would be a lot nicer to promote. Functionality matters. But looking good also does (and for many people it’s their first impression).

My TL;DR is this: Microsoft did some hacks to get the fonts to look good on lower resolution machines e.g. relying on the way the pixel Red Green and Blue colors were positioned to improve font smoothness. This paid off in the short term.

Apple just did the "right thing" in calculating fonts accurately and increasing resolution consistently to get every pixel to the right place. They have one consistent engine that renders fonts the "right way" where Microsoft has a messy set of pipelines delivering inconsistent/outdated results.

There's no generic "Linux" look really. It's very configurable, so you can achieve the look you want with it. The defaults will differ between environments too. See the follow-up discussions and config options in that Twitter thread.

I actually disagree with the assessment that fonts 'look better' on macos. They are blurrier and inconsistent. The linked tweet explains all this. I don't know how the conclusion can be 'it looks better' when it's harder to read.

I use the same font on macOs and Windows in Obsidian and for coding in PyCharm / Rider / CLion, i.e., PragmataPro Liga and it looks significantly better on macOs. JetBrains Mono does look much better too.

I use a bitmap font without antialiasing on macos and it's crystal clear. Selecting something more 'normal' or 'modern' then turning on antialiasing turns it into a blurry mess.

Agreed so much. The total neglect for people still using lo-DPI (a macos term) screens is just plan insult. I see a lot of excuses for axing subpixel hinting with the solution being, "buy a hi-DPI screen."

Even high dpi monitors are rough. Using a non-integer scaling, you run into weird flickering and inconsistent widths as things land on even (single) or odd (two) pixels. Using a 2x scaling, it's still blurry, just the fuzzy edges are half as wide. You can see this most strikingly when hairline black glyph stems turn into two pixel wide gray stems... and the adjacent stem lands on an even pixel so it's perfect. When this happens to double letters in words, it makes my brain think "This kinda looks like the word 'moon' but it can't be since the two o's aren't the same so it must be misspelled"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com