3 ms·

Where Microsoft beats Apple (Fonts)

12 points by steadicat 17y ago

stevelosh 17y ago
On every Windows system I've used recently (XP and 7, I haven't touched Vista) I cannot seem to get fonts of all sizes looking decent. If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally) larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts look terrible as a result. When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on all fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result. If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course. Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make all size fonts (excluding tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of Windows?
- Yaa101 17y ago
  To answer your last sentence, no and no. Fonts are designed for 300dpi and up and are made of mathematical vectors instead of pixels, to make them look good on 72 and 96 dpi (Apple & MS) hacks like hinting and antialiasing are used by the rasterizers (software that converts mathematical vectors to pixels) in their products. They are hacks and not real solutions as there aren't any, they have the tradeof you mention. However I advice you to go for the hinting and antialiasing for small fonts on screen and leave the large ones alone as long you don't display it on some megascreen, they both will come out perfect on your printer (unless you made bad settings or use cheap fonts). Subpixel antialiasing is mostly antialiasing with the help of color while normal antialiasing is a grayscale one.
- heresy 17y ago
  Not if the type designer didn't sit down and spend a lot of time hinting the font face for lower point sizes. Not many designers do.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  You can't really have this conversation without images. What you describe as awful and jagged could well be the intended effect that Cleartype is supposed to deliver. It is designed to fit letters to the pixel grid, just a slightly finer pixel grid than standard windows because it makes use of subpixels horizontally. Other people might give you advice on how to get "good" fonts without realising that what you want might be the OS X type rendering that they think is "blurry" and "unreadable".
epochwolf 17y ago
Just a note, subtitles on DVDs are actually video layers, not text. (Closed Captioning is text)
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  I wondered what he meant here too. He knows the difference and in fact rails angrily against UK-English speakers because we use "subtitles" to describe both subtitles and captions.
  - epochwolf 17y ago
    That's just a tad ironic.

12 points by steadicat 17y ago

On every Windows system I've used recently (XP and 7, I haven't touched Vista) I cannot seem to get fonts of all sizes looking decent. If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally) larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts look terrible as a result. When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on all fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result. If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course. Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make all size fonts (excluding tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of Windows?

Yaa101 17y ago
To answer your last sentence, no and no. Fonts are designed for 300dpi and up and are made of mathematical vectors instead of pixels, to make them look good on 72 and 96 dpi (Apple & MS) hacks like hinting and antialiasing are used by the rasterizers (software that converts mathematical vectors to pixels) in their products. They are hacks and not real solutions as there aren't any, they have the tradeof you mention. However I advice you to go for the hinting and antialiasing for small fonts on screen and leave the large ones alone as long you don't display it on some megascreen, they both will come out perfect on your printer (unless you made bad settings or use cheap fonts). Subpixel antialiasing is mostly antialiasing with the help of color while normal antialiasing is a grayscale one.
heresy 17y ago
Not if the type designer didn't sit down and spend a lot of time hinting the font face for lower point sizes. Not many designers do.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
You can't really have this conversation without images. What you describe as awful and jagged could well be the intended effect that Cleartype is supposed to deliver. It is designed to fit letters to the pixel grid, just a slightly finer pixel grid than standard windows because it makes use of subpixels horizontally. Other people might give you advice on how to get "good" fonts without realising that what you want might be the OS X type rendering that they think is "blurry" and "unreadable".

epochwolf 17y ago

Just a note, subtitles on DVDs are actually video layers, not text. (Closed Captioning is text)

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
I wondered what he meant here too. He knows the difference and in fact rails angrily against UK-English speakers because we use "subtitles" to describe both subtitles and captions.
- epochwolf 17y ago
  That's just a tad ironic.