10 ms·

The sad state of font rendering on Linux

181 points by iBelieve 8y ago

greatquux 8y ago
I actually do prefer font rendering on Linux to Windows. It strikes a good balance between Mac and Windows rendering.
_fq4v 8y ago
I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print. Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you're not wrong that Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters. > This occurs because Apple didn’t dare go near any ClearType patents that Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put everyone else to shame. Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do. This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts. With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype doesn't scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a failure. In case anyone doesn't believe the claim above, this article (https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...) goes into it in depth.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Yes, my recollection was that Apple was the first to market with vector fonts, hinting, and sub-pixel-rendering, and not by a small margin. I had to interact with their lowish-level C API that drew this stuff in the early 2000s -- it was definitely doing sub pixel rendering at a time when the competition was, uh, Windows XP. Retina officially happened in 2013, not 2015, and I distinctly remember playing with scale factors in 2008 and being frustrated by a search for competitive panels on non-Apple laptops in 2009, so they've been pushing high resolution panels far earlier than 2015, which is exactly what you would expect from a company in the premium niche. So yeah, OP is doing some sketchy revisionist history to dunk on Apple, but if Apple thought it was OK to release dark themes without updating SPR, hinting, etc to work on non-white backgrounds (which I suspect is the real issue here) then they do need a wakeup call.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Windows XP supported ClearType for sub-pixel rendering. It was off by default, I think because there was a slight performance impact and it didn't give good results on some older displays available at the time.
    - jjoonathan 8y ago
      Then I'm guilty of the same thing as OP: I saw in one particular instance that XP wasn't doing SPR and assumed it wasn't capable of it. OSX was definitely doing it at the time, though, because I had to deal with a visual issue that revolved around it, and it was everywhere by default. EDIT: Did some googling. This is a bigger, older, juicier drama than I knew. It even looks like Nathan Mhyrvold and Woz were involved! https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/12/biztech/articles/07microsoft-flat.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/... > Cleartype was suspiciously similar to approaches developed many years earlier by researchers at Apple Computer, IBM, Xerox Corp. and elsewhere. > Gibson decided to stake his own claim to history by creating a Web page to document what he calls the original pioneering work in sub-pixel technology by Steven Wozniak, designer of the Apple II computer. I believe this is the site: https://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm https://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
- neilalexander 8y ago
  Right - Apple even made a selling point out of the Quartz display rendering engine using PDF-compatible models internally (in much of a similar way that NeXT used Postscript-compatible models). It was designed specifically to enable true display-to-paper printing. No other platform comes remotely close to that yet.
  - josteink 8y ago
    But who cares about that when you’re using a computer screen and it all looks like a blurry mess?
    - tobr 8y ago
      Let’s try an analogy: most small loudspeakers are unable to get good volume without distorting the sound. You have a choice between playing music that sounds as intended but at a very soft volume, or to crank up the volume and make it sound like a noisy buzzsaw. This is analogous to the choice between type that looks like it is supposed to but a blurry mess, or type that looks sharp but has crazy pants distorted letter shapes. Arguably there’s a place for each of these approaches. If you have an extremely low resolution screen, or underpowered speaker, it makes sense to accept the distortion to be able to use the screen/speaker at all. But if you have fairly good speakers or a high resolution screen it just doesn’t, because the volume is loud enough as it is, and the blur is actually pretty sharp.
- MagicPropmaker 8y ago
  Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." A 5 point font magnified to twice its size will look different than the same font at 10 points. See https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of-responsive-typography https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of... for a discussion. (And look in Knuth's "Metafont") Windows handles fonts correctly. And Cleartype is an option you can turn on and off. It makes fonts look "more correct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all?
  - stefanfisk 8y ago
    Can you disable ClearType and still get antialiased font rendering? From what I remember it's either ClearType messing the fonts up or essentially getting no smoothing at all, and a quick googling seems to confirm this.
    - MagicPropmaker 8y ago
      Yes. I just turned it on and off, and I still get "antialised font rendering" but without taking advantage of sub-pixel rendering. You have to tune it based on your LCD screen geometry
  - tathougies 8y ago
    > Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." Correct, but when printed on paper (using movable type for example), the width of left-aligned text set in the same font at a continuously increasing point size typically has a nice 'linear' slope on the ragged right edge. Cleartype does not have this. Cleartype changes the text width drastically between point sizes close in magnitude The author criticized freetype for having a non-linear apparent font weight as the font point size is increased linearly. The author said this was bad without much justification, while simultaneously claiming cleartype is better, despite having the same issue of font metrics being discontinuous over a continuous point size. > It makes fonts look "more correcct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all? Not at all. Options are great. However, saying something is objectively better when in fact there are multiple use cases for which it is better and many for which it is worse is disingenuous, and that is what the author is doing.
- favorited 8y ago
  I totally agree. Just the other day I was chatting with a friend about how I was considering getting a higher-resolution display for my PC because text rendering looks so terrible next to my iMac. He told me not to bother, because he has a higher-res PC display and it still looks bad on his desk next to his Mac.
  - smt88 8y ago
    I've been using 4k displays on my laptop and desktop for years, and they look fantastic. It can be annoying to tweak scaling in Windows at first, but once you get the right setting, you never have to change it again. It takes about 10 min of setup (if it takes any setup at all).
- bhauer 8y ago
  > I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print. I strongly prefer Windows to Mac for font rendering. As you say, it's subjective. However, in today's world, the overwhelming majority of my computer use is screen-oriented. Printing accounts for a vanishingly small set of use cases for me, easily lower than 1%. And if the fonts were a few pixels off when printed, would I even notice? No. I'm not doing typesetting when I print; I'm merely creating a hardcopy of something so that I can read it when I'm not at a computer or printing a legal document to sign. In 2019, it seems odd to prioritize print layout at the expense of screen legibility. When I use a Mac (on a normal ~100 dpi screen), the text looks softened with bad anti-aliasing and I feel like I've stepped through a time machine to the amazing year 2000. On high-DPI displays the difference is less notable. But even there I think Windows does a better job at legibility; I find text more readable on-screen on a modern Surface than a comparable Mac laptop.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    It's not about whether you're actually printing it, the print version is just an accurate reference to the correct shape of how the font is designed. That shape doesn't necessarily line up on the pixel grid, so you can smush it around to get sharper edges on a computer screen at the expense of changing the shape/size/spacing of the font. Or you can follow the designed shape more correctly at the expense of smearing some stuff across multiple pixels. There are pros and cons to each, and which one you prefer is where it gets subjective. Some comparisons and discussion over here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph... The Windows text has sharper edges but it looks funny to me in comparison.
    - tobr 8y ago
      That comparison is very enlightening. The Windows version is very sharp, but the letter forms are completely distorted and it looks like it’s switching typeface as the point size changes, or even within the same sample. Look at the horizontal lines in the “z” in the larger sizes, they are very clearly too thin and don’t harmonize with the surrounding letters. Look at the relationship between the top of the “u” and “a” in “quartz”. The straight lines in the “u” serifs end at the exact same height as the curved top of the “a”, making the “u” appear, visually, to extend higher. You can clearly see in the Mac sample that there is some antialiasing on the “a” to fix this issue. I can understand how years of Windows will make the Mac sample look fuzzy, but I’m convinced the correct and harmonious word shapes on the Mac are much more important for reading flow.
- MrLeap 8y ago
  > This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts. It shouldn't be _that_ extraordinary. Much of my life experience has taught me that people/groups known for a 'thing' reinforce their prestige via a sort of circular reasoning. This can cause people to gloss over frayed edges. Sometimes dubious decisions are even taken as the "right way" moving forward! If the paragon of cheese says acrid, fishy cheese is great cheese, there's probably something to it, right? OSX, depending on the version, has an uneven margin here and there, or a weird aliased image during setup.. It's pretty clean all things considered, but Apple's reputation is a force multiplier and a floor on how their designs are appraised. Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile. "Courage" is an interesting way to describe those decisions. It's either that, or they're taking their reputation defense shield for granted. Eh, if cracks start to appear, they have enough money to do things right for a while.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile. These are takes a lot of Apple users would, to varying degrees, agree with, so I'm not sure how "hot" they are. :) You can make a case for all of those choices, too, but despite the reputation us Apple fans seem to have, most of us just aren't going to say "I hate this, but because Apple did this, I must actually love it." In fact, we tend to be very, very vocal about things Apple does that piss us off, and most of us have a list of such things that goes back decades. (Personally, I think removing the headphone jack is user hostile on the iPad Pro but not the phone; I think MagSafe is superior from a UX standpoint to USB-C, but USB-C has some advantages when you have USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, a test several of Apple's USB-C-only gadgets fail; and the Touch Bar is a solution in search of a problem.)
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    > Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. It's a trade-off that I'll take for having an industry standard power supply and a replaceable cable. Used to be if your power cord frayed at either the MagSafe end or the brick end you were out $80 for a replacement. Now you can buy a 60W USB-C power delivery brick with 3 bonus USB-A charging ports for $25 and if your cable ever goes bad it's a cheap replacement from Anker or similar. And I doubt you'll ever need to replace that cable because Anker is apparently better at making them than Apple ever was. I have one of these under my desk with cords for charging my laptop and phone/tablet: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24425 https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24425 Monoprice has frequent sales for even cheaper.
- moogly 8y ago
  To me, all fonts on OS X are different shades of bold. Cannot stand it.
coleifer 8y ago
I don't know...turn on subpixel with slight hinting, disable autohinter, enable lcdfilter and the result is pretty damn good. For monospace truetype fonts I use grayscale instead of subpixel, which I think is cleaner in the terminal... unless of course I'm using a bitmapped font. It took me quite a while to get it looking good, but ultimately I guess it's a matter of taste. Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.
- elros 8y ago
  > Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose. I have no idea. I want it to look good. With macOS I don't have to choose.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    The idea is that "look good" is subjective, case in point: you apparently think the font rendering on macOS looks good, whereas the author of the linked article thinks that font rendering on macOS looks bad and instead likes the font rendering on Windows 7.
    - snazz 8y ago
      I am of the same opinion as the author of the article. Mac fonts look blurry compared to ClearType. I usually use bitmapped fonts in Emacs and xterm, however, to sidestep the issue altogether. Fontconfig is always an option if needed. On the other hand, I really can’t tell the difference on an HiDPI display, even though I don’t use one (or want one, for that matter). Whatever the defaults are in Firefox on OpenBSD look superb on my monitor.
foobarbazetc 8y ago
“What they didn’t account for is that an overwhelming majority of legacy software had 96 DPI hardcoded into it, as well as the problem of mixed use of HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays where you need to somehow scale the entire UI back-and-forth when moved between displays. Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did, majority of the computer market share didn’t back the ultra-expensive 4K screens even to this day (2018). Software maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96. As of today, 4K experience is still a mixed bag that solves one simple problem for Apple, but introduces multiple complex problems for everyone else.” Uhmmm.... [citation needed]? I don’t have a single Mac app that assumes anything about 96 dpi and pretty much the entire Internet is 2x now. Windows on the other hand... yes. That’s a clusterfk in HiDPI.
- mikewhy 8y ago
  Why was this downvoted? This paragraph was one of the worst in the article. > Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as linux, but it's still very bad. > Software maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96 (on Windows)
  - foobarbazetc 8y ago
    I presume the author downvoted me, which is fine. But that entire paragraph shows a misunderstanding of the Mac world — it’s just not accurate.
  - izacus 8y ago
    > Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as linux, but it's still very bad. That seems like a massive overexaggeration. While there are still rough edges, running Windows on my MacBooks retina screen has been just fine for majority of popular apps. Including mixed HiDPI/normal DPI use cases.
    - 8y ago
alexandernst 8y ago
I used to use Windows and Linux for a very, very, very long time. Never even thought "hey, those fonts don't look quite as good as they could". Then one day I tried Mac. Period. Oh boy, ever since I just can't use anything else because of the fonts. It visually hurts my eyes.
- favorited 8y ago
  Font rendering is one of a handful of things that keep my Mac as my daily driver, and my PC is just for gaming (and occasional experiments with Windows dev, just to learn new things).
ktjfi 8y ago
"The sad state of <minor desktop feature> on Linux" Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.
- geoka9 8y ago
  I think it depends on one's requirements. If you want a system that can be customized heavily (for example you don't like using the mouse and want to use keyboard for everything), Linux is a godsent. If you want perennial consistency in your work env, it's very helpful too. For example, I've been running the same setup for 12 years, bringing it over from the old laptop every time I got a new one. In exchange for that convenience, I have to wrestle with wifi/ethernet settings once every few years (when I change my hardware); for me it's a small price to pay.
  - Insanity 8y ago
    Absolutely, the trade-off is a no-brainer to me. As a software engineer I would hate to be stuck on windows and see my productivity suffer. I think windows is not inherently worse though, it is probably great for how some programmers work or think, but to me Linux distros feel like a better match
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    "I think it depends on one's requirements." Computers are tools, endpoints these days. I have been happy with Linux but then again my needs are not super-complex. I have a recent freetype with a defaultish configuration and the results on my small by today's standards monitors are readable.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Yep. I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS. What killed me was: - wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time required a reboot. - substantially worse battery life - clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment. - buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs were different) - no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use two or more different platforms as the client. - the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well (for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth pissing him off. So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).
sametmax 8y ago
s/font rendering/wifi s/font rendering/bluetooth s/font rendering/sleep mode s/font rendering/battery life I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started on Mandrake), but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade. I really want to support free software, so I keep using it, reporting bugs and donating again and again. Many do. We hope that like with Firefox, if we support it consistently, it will eventually overcome the situation. But damn it's hard sometimes.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Font configuration is user solvable with configuration. Some of the options were literally forbidden from being distributed by parents but could be installed by the user. Google infinality. Exact advice depends on distro. Sleep is legitimately a pain.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    I've read the same comments since 2004. It doesn't help to solve the problem at all. At best, sometimes, it encourages you to spend a lot of time trying to find a solution that may work, or wreck your system (Exact result depends on distro).
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      I've never spent more than 5 minutes setting up font rendering on a new distro using the package manager and the configuration gui. I cannot imagine how I could break my system. It's probably true that there is a ton of bad advice a quick Google away especially since it's easy for advice to persist for many years after it's use by date. I guess the lesson is don't enter random commands you don't understand from guides from 2008.
- ubercow13 8y ago
  When I got my 2015 Windows laptop, sleep mode and wifi worked much better on Linux than Windows, where they were basically broken. It seems simply incorrect to say these things are broken in any real general way in Linux. It just depends.
smacktoward 8y ago
> The traditional way of [installing the Windows core Web fonts] is through installing ttf-mscorefonts-installer or msttcorefonts. The msttcorefonts package looks like some Shenzhen basement knockoff that renders poorly and doesn’t support Unicode. I suspect that these fonts have gone through multiple iterations in every Windows release and that the versions available through the repositories must be from around Windows 95 days. That does seem to be the case. Per Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web): > The latest font-versions that were available from Microsoft's Core fonts for the Web project were 2.x (e.g. 2.82 for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New for MS Windows), published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 with many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts." So while Windows and MacOS both have up-to-date versions of these fonts (Windows because Microsoft owns them, and MacOS because Apple licenses them from MS), the best Linux distributors can do is to package the last versions released before the 2002 re-licensing. (Or at least, that's the best they can do without paying Microsoft.)
jxdxbx 8y ago
This guy has some pretty weird opinions. Not only do I much prefer macOS's accurate font rendering aesthetically, the entire issue of sub pixel aliasing is moot with high-DPI screens anyway.
- Marsymars 8y ago
  I look forward to the day when I can drop in a high-DPI screen to my home office setup that works just like my current non high-DPI screen, but with a higher pixel density. (5K ultrawides to replace my 34" monitor simply don't exist yet, and the current 12" MacBook can't drive a regular 5K monitor.)
scblock 8y ago
As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent in font rendering program by program, and on most non-hidpi screens looks like trash. Especially when using scaled displays (such as 1.25 or 1.5x scaling on a 4k screen), where half of software turns into a blurry, unreadable mess.
- neilalexander 8y ago
  As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities. Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or - worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.
  - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
    My big question about this is Why? Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off with virtually no fanfare? For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes, when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the problems that seem to still plague Windows 10. I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.
    - wbond 8y ago
      The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling. On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200% (including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the display's scale. On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land. Adding mixed high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at 200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code changes were far more invasive for Windows. We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet. Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have gaps and overlaps.
tinza123 8y ago
I honestly think freetype on Linux looks much better than windows (too thin and sharp) and mac (too muddy).
ingenieroariel 8y ago
I recently moved to nixos with sway for my desktop and after trying Firefox with wayland there I realized I had never seen text in linux so sharp. I read the whole post but could not tell if what he mentions implicates both xorg as well as wayland?
vore 8y ago
A related article from AGG talking about some of the subtleties of font rasterization: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/ http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/
Aardwolf 8y ago
I'm probably less picky than the author of the article, but issues I do notice are (in Linux, but since I only use it I don't know if they exist in other OSes too): -some websites render with a very strange font, that includes quote symbols '"' being very tiny, which I'm not sure if actually intended like that or a problem in linux specifically, and sometimes all letters being rendered in such ugly way to be hard to read -symbols in mathematical formulas (some types of arrow, ...) rendered as colored emoji, even if they shouldn't in that situation since it's not a chat program according to the unicode spec -sometimes unicode chars becoming a square box, even if having tons of fonts installed
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > according to the unicode spec Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour they should be?
  - tatersolid 8y ago
    > Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour they should be? Umm... yes? Unicode includes “reference glyphs” in its character charts. They’re called “reference” for a reason: implementations of those glyphs should appear substantially similar.
asumaran 8y ago
He lost me at > OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering.
- vernie 8y ago
  "Do a controlled reading speed experiment against Windows." Nobody will do this.
linuxftw 8y ago
Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install. Linux seems to have a lot of detractors around these parts. This person obviously cares more about fonts than freedom, privacy, and respect for the end user.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > everything displayed perfectly But what do you consider 'perfect' font rendering? Maybe it's a lower bar than the author.
  - BenjiWiebe 8y ago
    I use Fedora and I've never noticed anything wrong with the font rendering. However, now that I've read the article, I'm guessing that's why I notice more eye strain when doing lots of reading on my computer versus the other (Windows) computer in the house.
- snazz 8y ago
  Fedora includes fonts to cover most every common Unicode glyph. If you visit my HN profile page, I see few boxes on Fedora, compared to Android or Debian. Additionally, their font hinting looks good out of the box and it can be configured in GNOME Tweak Tool. I’m impressed at the Fedora team’s attention to visual detail.
- onli 8y ago
  I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ and look at "Willing". Compare with https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.pn.... On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in that word. That's a shame. There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all engines have that issue that's a real problem.
badsectoracula 8y ago
> Some users even disable all ClearType rendering and anti-aliasing, claiming that it reduces eyestrain and that anti-aliasing damages eyesight. It’s kind of like anti-vaxxing (hello from 2019 if you are reading this in the future). I hope the anti-vaxxing comparison is only for the "eyesight damage" part, otherwise this paragraph is bullshit in its entirety. From my own personal experience, i vastly prefer antialising disabled, assuming that there fonts used have hinting available that support it. Or even better, bitmap fonts made to be clean and crisp (as opposed to just being rasterized versions of vector fonts). Of course if you try to use fonts that disregard hinting and aren't compatible (or even tested at all) with antialiasing disabled, like the font the author's site uses which looks like total crap on my PC, then, yeah, compared to that i prefer AA with CT. I find annoying that you need to mess with the registry to disable antialiasing in Windows 10, but at least the option is still there.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  SPR absolutely gives me eyestrain, though I can't blind test it because on a 1920x1200 display I can easily see the fringing.
Insanity 8y ago
Personally, the font rendering in a Windows terminal looks abysmal to me. I hugely prefer my linux terminals (out of the box). Just my 2c
- bluedino 8y ago
  Even then, it depends on your configuration. I was amazed at how different the fonts looked on Fedora vs Ubuntu on identical laptops.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  That's not a terminal, but a console, and uses ancient GDI graphics.
jchw 8y ago
I'm surprised there was hardly any mention of pixel grid fitting, or even just accuracy. My favorite article on font rendering is one from Antigrain Geometry[1] that goes a fair bit further in improving subpixel rendering imo. Nonetheless their use of the word objective is very annoying since I greatly prefer grayscale with no hinting even on Linux at 96 DPI. It's a bit blurry, but it consistently looks right. No kerning issues. Also, it is laughable to suggest that Windows never had issues with font rendering. Just look at Microsoft Word struggling to balance between accurately displaying documents and rendering the fonts with Cleartype as shown in the AGG article. [1]: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/ http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/
carlospwk 8y ago
Really interesting read on how fonts render on different systems. However a huge reason why I went from Win to macOS are the incredibly frustrating scaling issues. At work I gave up and just set my laptop display to 100% since I’d rather deal with the occasional tiny text than always having incredibly blurry fonts in certain crucial apps like Outlook. I do agree that macOS fonts are nearly unreadable without a Retina/4K display. However I’ve never noticed any scaling issues on macOS.
vernie 8y ago
macOS had subpixel rendering until the most recent version (Mojave), where it's disabled by default.
strenholme 8y ago
My subjective take on font rendering, based on tweaking and hinting web fonts, is that MacOS has the best font rendering (since their laptops have been using retina displays, with the exception of the Macbook Air; even here the font rendering may look a little blurry but the fonts look quite good and are readable); Linux has quite good font rendering (they may make the letters look bigger on low resolution displays, but things are nice and readable); and Windows font rendering is very uneven. Most browsers have their own take of Clear type font rendering when rendering web fonts. While some make web fonts look quite good (Firefox, Internet Explorer/Edge), Chrome has had issues with using settings which make fonts harder to read; I had to increase the weight of the font I use some to compensate for this. Clear Type, on the default settings Chrome used for a long time, is really great, if you’re rendering a Windows font like Calibri or Cambria. For anything else, the results are uneven. (I think Chrome finally started tweaking things in Windows to look better) In terms of the linked webpage, his comparison is unfair: He is comparing how Arial, a Microsoft font, looks in Linux compared to how it looks in Windows. Liberation Sans has the same metrics as Arial, so is not a good comparison font; he should had used something more OS-agnostic, such as Bitstream Vera Sans (DejaVu Sans if you want more languages).
crazygringo 8y ago
> 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...
- waynecochran 8y ago
  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.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Not defending Windows, but I find the common latex font clumsy and hard to read.
    - snazz 8y ago
      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.
    - 8y ago
sigspec 8y ago
This article is "OBJECTIVELY" bad.
fizixer 8y ago
Funny how you singled out Linux, a free/open source OS. Because just a few days ago I read that fonts, as well as UI elements in general, are a complete mess in both Mac and Windows, two paid/closed-source OSes, when you try to use them with Hi DPI displays.
marsrover 8y ago
I came here to bitch about the fact that Mac has "objectively" the worst fonts, when I've preferred it over Windows or Linux for years. Glad to see everybody has my back.
BearOso 8y ago
There’s not enough resolution at 96dpi to render fonts correctly. You have to make compromises one way or another. Windows snaps to pixel boundaries more strongly, while Mac does no hinting to keep shapes correct. The author, while his opinion should be taken lightly, is trying to get subpixel positioning into Chrome and GTK. This is something positive, and something Windows and MacOS already have. Qt can do it, too, but as of a few years ago KDE/Plasma was actively disabling it because of inconsistencies in Xlib and image rendering backends.
mrob 8y ago
I used to care a great deal about font rendering, but when I got eyeglasses I had trouble learning to focus with them. To make it easier, I disabled anti-aliasing, giving the fonts maximum sharpness, and making it obvious if I was focusing correctly. Surprisingly, I got used to this and never switched back. The most legible font is the one you're most used to, but if there's any objective measure of quality, it has to be sharpness. No anti-aliasing = maximum sharpness. It might look ugly at first, but you get used to it quickly. I recommend trying it.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
I quite like the fonts on linux with my 4k monitors, subpixel smoothing, and slight hinting. Mac and Windows are also fine on a ~200 dpi monitor. Believe this is a solved problem for those who do not obsess about fonts.
driverdan 8y ago
For everyone criticizing his views on MacOS X, try using an external display with a lower PPI. It's not obvious on native laptop screens with 220+ppi. On my Dell U3415W (109ppi) the issues he pointed out are very obvious. An equal sign (=) for example has a much thicker and blurrier bottom bar than the top. The rendering of the H in "History" is different than the H in "Help" in the menu bar.
commoner 8y ago
There is a way to restore Infinality-like font rendering on freetype2, which improves text readability. Linux users may find these instructions helpful: https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671 https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5... Skip the "Removing the infinality-bundle" section if you don't currently use Infinality.
petercooper 8y ago
OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. And yet OS X's font rendering being by far the best for me is a key thing that has kept me on the Mac despite all the other warts. I find text elsewhere horribly blocky. It's all very subjective, it seems. Also, I think the grayscale antialiasing is a new thing, it certainly didn't used to be the case, but maybe they switched how it worked once retina screens became the norm.
ggm 8y ago
The bad part is that you need to do a s/objective/subjective/g on it. Once you realize it's subjective, it's a fun fine informative rant
jimbo1qaz 8y ago
https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-general.html https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener... > It turns out that font rendering in the Linux ecosystem has been wrong since scalable fonts were introduced to it. Text must be rendered with linear alpha blending and gamma correction, which no toolkit or rendering library does by default on X11, even though Qt5 and Skia (as used by Google Chrome and other browsers) can do it. The primary effect of no gamma correction is that light-on-dark text is too thin (and dark-on-light is thick but readable).

181 points by iBelieve 8y ago

I actually do prefer font rendering on Linux to Windows. It strikes a good balance between Mac and Windows rendering.

I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print. Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you're not wrong that Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters. > This occurs because Apple didn’t dare go near any ClearType patents that Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put everyone else to shame. Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do. This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts. With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype doesn't scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a failure. In case anyone doesn't believe the claim above, this article (https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...) goes into it in depth.

jjoonathan 8y ago
Yes, my recollection was that Apple was the first to market with vector fonts, hinting, and sub-pixel-rendering, and not by a small margin. I had to interact with their lowish-level C API that drew this stuff in the early 2000s -- it was definitely doing sub pixel rendering at a time when the competition was, uh, Windows XP. Retina officially happened in 2013, not 2015, and I distinctly remember playing with scale factors in 2008 and being frustrated by a search for competitive panels on non-Apple laptops in 2009, so they've been pushing high resolution panels far earlier than 2015, which is exactly what you would expect from a company in the premium niche. So yeah, OP is doing some sketchy revisionist history to dunk on Apple, but if Apple thought it was OK to release dark themes without updating SPR, hinting, etc to work on non-white backgrounds (which I suspect is the real issue here) then they do need a wakeup call.
- nradov 8y ago
  Windows XP supported ClearType for sub-pixel rendering. It was off by default, I think because there was a slight performance impact and it didn't give good results on some older displays available at the time.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Then I'm guilty of the same thing as OP: I saw in one particular instance that XP wasn't doing SPR and assumed it wasn't capable of it. OSX was definitely doing it at the time, though, because I had to deal with a visual issue that revolved around it, and it was everywhere by default. EDIT: Did some googling. This is a bigger, older, juicier drama than I knew. It even looks like Nathan Mhyrvold and Woz were involved! https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/12/biztech/articles/07microsoft-flat.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/... > Cleartype was suspiciously similar to approaches developed many years earlier by researchers at Apple Computer, IBM, Xerox Corp. and elsewhere. > Gibson decided to stake his own claim to history by creating a Web page to document what he calls the original pioneering work in sub-pixel technology by Steven Wozniak, designer of the Apple II computer. I believe this is the site: https://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm https://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
neilalexander 8y ago
Right - Apple even made a selling point out of the Quartz display rendering engine using PDF-compatible models internally (in much of a similar way that NeXT used Postscript-compatible models). It was designed specifically to enable true display-to-paper printing. No other platform comes remotely close to that yet.
- josteink 8y ago
  But who cares about that when you’re using a computer screen and it all looks like a blurry mess?
  - tobr 8y ago
    Let’s try an analogy: most small loudspeakers are unable to get good volume without distorting the sound. You have a choice between playing music that sounds as intended but at a very soft volume, or to crank up the volume and make it sound like a noisy buzzsaw. This is analogous to the choice between type that looks like it is supposed to but a blurry mess, or type that looks sharp but has crazy pants distorted letter shapes. Arguably there’s a place for each of these approaches. If you have an extremely low resolution screen, or underpowered speaker, it makes sense to accept the distortion to be able to use the screen/speaker at all. But if you have fairly good speakers or a high resolution screen it just doesn’t, because the volume is loud enough as it is, and the blur is actually pretty sharp.
MagicPropmaker 8y ago
Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." A 5 point font magnified to twice its size will look different than the same font at 10 points. See https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of-responsive-typography https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of... for a discussion. (And look in Knuth's "Metafont") Windows handles fonts correctly. And Cleartype is an option you can turn on and off. It makes fonts look "more correct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all?
- stefanfisk 8y ago
  Can you disable ClearType and still get antialiased font rendering? From what I remember it's either ClearType messing the fonts up or essentially getting no smoothing at all, and a quick googling seems to confirm this.
  - MagicPropmaker 8y ago
    Yes. I just turned it on and off, and I still get "antialised font rendering" but without taking advantage of sub-pixel rendering. You have to tune it based on your LCD screen geometry
- tathougies 8y ago
  > Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." Correct, but when printed on paper (using movable type for example), the width of left-aligned text set in the same font at a continuously increasing point size typically has a nice 'linear' slope on the ragged right edge. Cleartype does not have this. Cleartype changes the text width drastically between point sizes close in magnitude The author criticized freetype for having a non-linear apparent font weight as the font point size is increased linearly. The author said this was bad without much justification, while simultaneously claiming cleartype is better, despite having the same issue of font metrics being discontinuous over a continuous point size. > It makes fonts look "more correcct" on many types of displays. Are you saying it's better not to have that option available at all? Not at all. Options are great. However, saying something is objectively better when in fact there are multiple use cases for which it is better and many for which it is worse is disingenuous, and that is what the author is doing.
favorited 8y ago
I totally agree. Just the other day I was chatting with a friend about how I was considering getting a higher-resolution display for my PC because text rendering looks so terrible next to my iMac. He told me not to bother, because he has a higher-res PC display and it still looks bad on his desk next to his Mac.
- smt88 8y ago
  I've been using 4k displays on my laptop and desktop for years, and they look fantastic. It can be annoying to tweak scaling in Windows at first, but once you get the right setting, you never have to change it again. It takes about 10 min of setup (if it takes any setup at all).
bhauer 8y ago
> I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print. I strongly prefer Windows to Mac for font rendering. As you say, it's subjective. However, in today's world, the overwhelming majority of my computer use is screen-oriented. Printing accounts for a vanishingly small set of use cases for me, easily lower than 1%. And if the fonts were a few pixels off when printed, would I even notice? No. I'm not doing typesetting when I print; I'm merely creating a hardcopy of something so that I can read it when I'm not at a computer or printing a legal document to sign. In 2019, it seems odd to prioritize print layout at the expense of screen legibility. When I use a Mac (on a normal ~100 dpi screen), the text looks softened with bad anti-aliasing and I feel like I've stepped through a time machine to the amazing year 2000. On high-DPI displays the difference is less notable. But even there I think Windows does a better job at legibility; I find text more readable on-screen on a modern Surface than a comparable Mac laptop.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  It's not about whether you're actually printing it, the print version is just an accurate reference to the correct shape of how the font is designed. That shape doesn't necessarily line up on the pixel grid, so you can smush it around to get sharper edges on a computer screen at the expense of changing the shape/size/spacing of the font. Or you can follow the designed shape more correctly at the expense of smearing some stuff across multiple pixels. There are pros and cons to each, and which one you prefer is where it gets subjective. Some comparisons and discussion over here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph... The Windows text has sharper edges but it looks funny to me in comparison.
  - tobr 8y ago
    That comparison is very enlightening. The Windows version is very sharp, but the letter forms are completely distorted and it looks like it’s switching typeface as the point size changes, or even within the same sample. Look at the horizontal lines in the “z” in the larger sizes, they are very clearly too thin and don’t harmonize with the surrounding letters. Look at the relationship between the top of the “u” and “a” in “quartz”. The straight lines in the “u” serifs end at the exact same height as the curved top of the “a”, making the “u” appear, visually, to extend higher. You can clearly see in the Mac sample that there is some antialiasing on the “a” to fix this issue. I can understand how years of Windows will make the Mac sample look fuzzy, but I’m convinced the correct and harmonious word shapes on the Mac are much more important for reading flow.
MrLeap 8y ago
> This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts. It shouldn't be _that_ extraordinary. Much of my life experience has taught me that people/groups known for a 'thing' reinforce their prestige via a sort of circular reasoning. This can cause people to gloss over frayed edges. Sometimes dubious decisions are even taken as the "right way" moving forward! If the paragon of cheese says acrid, fishy cheese is great cheese, there's probably something to it, right? OSX, depending on the version, has an uneven margin here and there, or a weird aliased image during setup.. It's pretty clean all things considered, but Apple's reputation is a force multiplier and a floor on how their designs are appraised. Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile. "Courage" is an interesting way to describe those decisions. It's either that, or they're taking their reputation defense shield for granted. Eh, if cracks start to appear, they have enough money to do things right for a while.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Hot take: The touch bar is goofballs. Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. Removing the headphone jack is user hostile. These are takes a lot of Apple users would, to varying degrees, agree with, so I'm not sure how "hot" they are. :) You can make a case for all of those choices, too, but despite the reputation us Apple fans seem to have, most of us just aren't going to say "I hate this, but because Apple did this, I must actually love it." In fact, we tend to be very, very vocal about things Apple does that piss us off, and most of us have a list of such things that goes back decades. (Personally, I think removing the headphone jack is user hostile on the iPad Pro but not the phone; I think MagSafe is superior from a UX standpoint to USB-C, but USB-C has some advantages when you have USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, a test several of Apple's USB-C-only gadgets fail; and the Touch Bar is a solution in search of a problem.)
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  > Going from a magnetic connector to usb-3 is a usability regression. It's a trade-off that I'll take for having an industry standard power supply and a replaceable cable. Used to be if your power cord frayed at either the MagSafe end or the brick end you were out $80 for a replacement. Now you can buy a 60W USB-C power delivery brick with 3 bonus USB-A charging ports for $25 and if your cable ever goes bad it's a cheap replacement from Anker or similar. And I doubt you'll ever need to replace that cable because Anker is apparently better at making them than Apple ever was. I have one of these under my desk with cords for charging my laptop and phone/tablet: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24425 https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24425 Monoprice has frequent sales for even cheaper.
moogly 8y ago
To me, all fonts on OS X are different shades of bold. Cannot stand it.

coleifer 8y ago

I don't know...turn on subpixel with slight hinting, disable autohinter, enable lcdfilter and the result is pretty damn good. For monospace truetype fonts I use grayscale instead of subpixel, which I think is cleaner in the terminal... unless of course I'm using a bitmapped font. It took me quite a while to get it looking good, but ultimately I guess it's a matter of taste. Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.

elros 8y ago
> Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose. I have no idea. I want it to look good. With macOS I don't have to choose.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  The idea is that "look good" is subjective, case in point: you apparently think the font rendering on macOS looks good, whereas the author of the linked article thinks that font rendering on macOS looks bad and instead likes the font rendering on Windows 7.
  - snazz 8y ago
    I am of the same opinion as the author of the article. Mac fonts look blurry compared to ClearType. I usually use bitmapped fonts in Emacs and xterm, however, to sidestep the issue altogether. Fontconfig is always an option if needed. On the other hand, I really can’t tell the difference on an HiDPI display, even though I don’t use one (or want one, for that matter). Whatever the defaults are in Firefox on OpenBSD look superb on my monitor.

foobarbazetc 8y ago

“What they didn’t account for is that an overwhelming majority of legacy software had 96 DPI hardcoded into it, as well as the problem of mixed use of HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays where you need to somehow scale the entire UI back-and-forth when moved between displays. Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did, majority of the computer market share didn’t back the ultra-expensive 4K screens even to this day (2018). Software maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96. As of today, 4K experience is still a mixed bag that solves one simple problem for Apple, but introduces multiple complex problems for everyone else.” Uhmmm.... [citation needed]? I don’t have a single Mac app that assumes anything about 96 dpi and pretty much the entire Internet is 2x now. Windows on the other hand... yes. That’s a clusterfk in HiDPI.

mikewhy 8y ago
Why was this downvoted? This paragraph was one of the worst in the article. > Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as linux, but it's still very bad. > Software maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96 (on Windows)
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  I presume the author downvoted me, which is fine. But that entire paragraph shows a misunderstanding of the Mac world — it’s just not accurate.
- izacus 8y ago
  > Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as linux, but it's still very bad. That seems like a massive overexaggeration. While there are still rough edges, running Windows on my MacBooks retina screen has been just fine for majority of popular apps. Including mixed HiDPI/normal DPI use cases.
  - 8y ago

alexandernst 8y ago

I used to use Windows and Linux for a very, very, very long time. Never even thought "hey, those fonts don't look quite as good as they could". Then one day I tried Mac. Period. Oh boy, ever since I just can't use anything else because of the fonts. It visually hurts my eyes.

favorited 8y ago
Font rendering is one of a handful of things that keep my Mac as my daily driver, and my PC is just for gaming (and occasional experiments with Windows dev, just to learn new things).

ktjfi 8y ago

"The sad state of <minor desktop feature> on Linux" Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.

geoka9 8y ago
I think it depends on one's requirements. If you want a system that can be customized heavily (for example you don't like using the mouse and want to use keyboard for everything), Linux is a godsent. If you want perennial consistency in your work env, it's very helpful too. For example, I've been running the same setup for 12 years, bringing it over from the old laptop every time I got a new one. In exchange for that convenience, I have to wrestle with wifi/ethernet settings once every few years (when I change my hardware); for me it's a small price to pay.
- Insanity 8y ago
  Absolutely, the trade-off is a no-brainer to me. As a software engineer I would hate to be stuck on windows and see my productivity suffer. I think windows is not inherently worse though, it is probably great for how some programmers work or think, but to me Linux distros feel like a better match
- keithpeter 8y ago
  "I think it depends on one's requirements." Computers are tools, endpoints these days. I have been happy with Linux but then again my needs are not super-complex. I have a recent freetype with a defaultish configuration and the results on my small by today's standards monitors are readable.
GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Yep. I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS. What killed me was: - wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time required a reboot. - substantially worse battery life - clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment. - buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs were different) - no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use two or more different platforms as the client. - the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well (for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth pissing him off. So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).

sametmax 8y ago

s/font rendering/wifi s/font rendering/bluetooth s/font rendering/sleep mode s/font rendering/battery life I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started on Mandrake), but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade. I really want to support free software, so I keep using it, reporting bugs and donating again and again. Many do. We hope that like with Firefox, if we support it consistently, it will eventually overcome the situation. But damn it's hard sometimes.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Font configuration is user solvable with configuration. Some of the options were literally forbidden from being distributed by parents but could be installed by the user. Google infinality. Exact advice depends on distro. Sleep is legitimately a pain.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I've read the same comments since 2004. It doesn't help to solve the problem at all. At best, sometimes, it encourages you to spend a lot of time trying to find a solution that may work, or wreck your system (Exact result depends on distro).
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I've never spent more than 5 minutes setting up font rendering on a new distro using the package manager and the configuration gui. I cannot imagine how I could break my system. It's probably true that there is a ton of bad advice a quick Google away especially since it's easy for advice to persist for many years after it's use by date. I guess the lesson is don't enter random commands you don't understand from guides from 2008.
ubercow13 8y ago
When I got my 2015 Windows laptop, sleep mode and wifi worked much better on Linux than Windows, where they were basically broken. It seems simply incorrect to say these things are broken in any real general way in Linux. It just depends.

smacktoward 8y ago

> The traditional way of [installing the Windows core Web fonts] is through installing ttf-mscorefonts-installer or msttcorefonts. The msttcorefonts package looks like some Shenzhen basement knockoff that renders poorly and doesn’t support Unicode. I suspect that these fonts have gone through multiple iterations in every Windows release and that the versions available through the repositories must be from around Windows 95 days. That does seem to be the case. Per Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web): > The latest font-versions that were available from Microsoft's Core fonts for the Web project were 2.x (e.g. 2.82 for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New for MS Windows), published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 with many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts." So while Windows and MacOS both have up-to-date versions of these fonts (Windows because Microsoft owns them, and MacOS because Apple licenses them from MS), the best Linux distributors can do is to package the last versions released before the 2002 re-licensing. (Or at least, that's the best they can do without paying Microsoft.)

jxdxbx 8y ago

This guy has some pretty weird opinions. Not only do I much prefer macOS's accurate font rendering aesthetically, the entire issue of sub pixel aliasing is moot with high-DPI screens anyway.

Marsymars 8y ago
I look forward to the day when I can drop in a high-DPI screen to my home office setup that works just like my current non high-DPI screen, but with a higher pixel density. (5K ultrawides to replace my 34" monitor simply don't exist yet, and the current 12" MacBook can't drive a regular 5K monitor.)

scblock 8y ago

As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent in font rendering program by program, and on most non-hidpi screens looks like trash. Especially when using scaled displays (such as 1.25 or 1.5x scaling on a 4k screen), where half of software turns into a blurry, unreadable mess.

neilalexander 8y ago
As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities. Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or - worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  My big question about this is Why? Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off with virtually no fanfare? For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes, when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the problems that seem to still plague Windows 10. I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.
  - wbond 8y ago
    The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling. On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200% (including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the display's scale. On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land. Adding mixed high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at 200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code changes were far more invasive for Windows. We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet. Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have gaps and overlaps.

tinza123 8y ago

I honestly think freetype on Linux looks much better than windows (too thin and sharp) and mac (too muddy).

ingenieroariel 8y ago

I recently moved to nixos with sway for my desktop and after trying Firefox with wayland there I realized I had never seen text in linux so sharp. I read the whole post but could not tell if what he mentions implicates both xorg as well as wayland?

vore 8y ago

A related article from AGG talking about some of the subtleties of font rasterization: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/ http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

Aardwolf 8y ago

I'm probably less picky than the author of the article, but issues I do notice are (in Linux, but since I only use it I don't know if they exist in other OSes too): -some websites render with a very strange font, that includes quote symbols '"' being very tiny, which I'm not sure if actually intended like that or a problem in linux specifically, and sometimes all letters being rendered in such ugly way to be hard to read -symbols in mathematical formulas (some types of arrow, ...) rendered as colored emoji, even if they shouldn't in that situation since it's not a chat program according to the unicode spec -sometimes unicode chars becoming a square box, even if having tons of fonts installed

chrisseaton 8y ago
> according to the unicode spec Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour they should be?
- tatersolid 8y ago
  > Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour they should be? Umm... yes? Unicode includes “reference glyphs” in its character charts. They’re called “reference” for a reason: implementations of those glyphs should appear substantially similar.

asumaran 8y ago

He lost me at > OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering.

vernie 8y ago
"Do a controlled reading speed experiment against Windows." Nobody will do this.

linuxftw 8y ago

Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install. Linux seems to have a lot of detractors around these parts. This person obviously cares more about fonts than freedom, privacy, and respect for the end user.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> everything displayed perfectly But what do you consider 'perfect' font rendering? Maybe it's a lower bar than the author.
- BenjiWiebe 8y ago
  I use Fedora and I've never noticed anything wrong with the font rendering. However, now that I've read the article, I'm guessing that's why I notice more eye strain when doing lots of reading on my computer versus the other (Windows) computer in the house.
snazz 8y ago
Fedora includes fonts to cover most every common Unicode glyph. If you visit my HN profile page, I see few boxes on Fedora, compared to Android or Debian. Additionally, their font hinting looks good out of the box and it can be configured in GNOME Tweak Tool. I’m impressed at the Fedora team’s attention to visual detail.
onli 8y ago
I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/ and look at "Willing". Compare with https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.pn.... On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in that word. That's a shame. There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all engines have that issue that's a real problem.

badsectoracula 8y ago

> Some users even disable all ClearType rendering and anti-aliasing, claiming that it reduces eyestrain and that anti-aliasing damages eyesight. It’s kind of like anti-vaxxing (hello from 2019 if you are reading this in the future). I hope the anti-vaxxing comparison is only for the "eyesight damage" part, otherwise this paragraph is bullshit in its entirety. From my own personal experience, i vastly prefer antialising disabled, assuming that there fonts used have hinting available that support it. Or even better, bitmap fonts made to be clean and crisp (as opposed to just being rasterized versions of vector fonts). Of course if you try to use fonts that disregard hinting and aren't compatible (or even tested at all) with antialiasing disabled, like the font the author's site uses which looks like total crap on my PC, then, yeah, compared to that i prefer AA with CT. I find annoying that you need to mess with the registry to disable antialiasing in Windows 10, but at least the option is still there.

aidenn0 8y ago
SPR absolutely gives me eyestrain, though I can't blind test it because on a 1920x1200 display I can easily see the fringing.

Insanity 8y ago

Personally, the font rendering in a Windows terminal looks abysmal to me. I hugely prefer my linux terminals (out of the box). Just my 2c

bluedino 8y ago
Even then, it depends on your configuration. I was amazed at how different the fonts looked on Fedora vs Ubuntu on identical laptops.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
That's not a terminal, but a console, and uses ancient GDI graphics.

jchw 8y ago

I'm surprised there was hardly any mention of pixel grid fitting, or even just accuracy. My favorite article on font rendering is one from Antigrain Geometry[1] that goes a fair bit further in improving subpixel rendering imo. Nonetheless their use of the word objective is very annoying since I greatly prefer grayscale with no hinting even on Linux at 96 DPI. It's a bit blurry, but it consistently looks right. No kerning issues. Also, it is laughable to suggest that Windows never had issues with font rendering. Just look at Microsoft Word struggling to balance between accurately displaying documents and rendering the fonts with Cleartype as shown in the AGG article. [1]: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/ http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

carlospwk 8y ago

Really interesting read on how fonts render on different systems. However a huge reason why I went from Win to macOS are the incredibly frustrating scaling issues. At work I gave up and just set my laptop display to 100% since I’d rather deal with the occasional tiny text than always having incredibly blurry fonts in certain crucial apps like Outlook. I do agree that macOS fonts are nearly unreadable without a Retina/4K display. However I’ve never noticed any scaling issues on macOS.

vernie 8y ago

macOS had subpixel rendering until the most recent version (Mojave), where it's disabled by default.

strenholme 8y ago

My subjective take on font rendering, based on tweaking and hinting web fonts, is that MacOS has the best font rendering (since their laptops have been using retina displays, with the exception of the Macbook Air; even here the font rendering may look a little blurry but the fonts look quite good and are readable); Linux has quite good font rendering (they may make the letters look bigger on low resolution displays, but things are nice and readable); and Windows font rendering is very uneven. Most browsers have their own take of Clear type font rendering when rendering web fonts. While some make web fonts look quite good (Firefox, Internet Explorer/Edge), Chrome has had issues with using settings which make fonts harder to read; I had to increase the weight of the font I use some to compensate for this. Clear Type, on the default settings Chrome used for a long time, is really great, if you’re rendering a Windows font like Calibri or Cambria. For anything else, the results are uneven. (I think Chrome finally started tweaking things in Windows to look better) In terms of the linked webpage, his comparison is unfair: He is comparing how Arial, a Microsoft font, looks in Linux compared to how it looks in Windows. Liberation Sans has the same metrics as Arial, so is not a good comparison font; he should had used something more OS-agnostic, such as Bitstream Vera Sans (DejaVu Sans if you want more languages).

crazygringo 8y ago

> 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...

waynecochran 8y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Not defending Windows, but I find the common latex font clumsy and hard to read.
  - snazz 8y ago
    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.
  - 8y ago

sigspec 8y ago

This article is "OBJECTIVELY" bad.

fizixer 8y ago

Funny how you singled out Linux, a free/open source OS. Because just a few days ago I read that fonts, as well as UI elements in general, are a complete mess in both Mac and Windows, two paid/closed-source OSes, when you try to use them with Hi DPI displays.

marsrover 8y ago

I came here to bitch about the fact that Mac has "objectively" the worst fonts, when I've preferred it over Windows or Linux for years. Glad to see everybody has my back.

BearOso 8y ago

There’s not enough resolution at 96dpi to render fonts correctly. You have to make compromises one way or another. Windows snaps to pixel boundaries more strongly, while Mac does no hinting to keep shapes correct. The author, while his opinion should be taken lightly, is trying to get subpixel positioning into Chrome and GTK. This is something positive, and something Windows and MacOS already have. Qt can do it, too, but as of a few years ago KDE/Plasma was actively disabling it because of inconsistencies in Xlib and image rendering backends.

mrob 8y ago

I used to care a great deal about font rendering, but when I got eyeglasses I had trouble learning to focus with them. To make it easier, I disabled anti-aliasing, giving the fonts maximum sharpness, and making it obvious if I was focusing correctly. Surprisingly, I got used to this and never switched back. The most legible font is the one you're most used to, but if there's any objective measure of quality, it has to be sharpness. No anti-aliasing = maximum sharpness. It might look ugly at first, but you get used to it quickly. I recommend trying it.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

I quite like the fonts on linux with my 4k monitors, subpixel smoothing, and slight hinting. Mac and Windows are also fine on a ~200 dpi monitor. Believe this is a solved problem for those who do not obsess about fonts.

driverdan 8y ago

For everyone criticizing his views on MacOS X, try using an external display with a lower PPI. It's not obvious on native laptop screens with 220+ppi. On my Dell U3415W (109ppi) the issues he pointed out are very obvious. An equal sign (=) for example has a much thicker and blurrier bottom bar than the top. The rendering of the H in "History" is different than the H in "Help" in the menu bar.

commoner 8y ago

There is a way to restore Infinality-like font rendering on freetype2, which improves text readability. Linux users may find these instructions helpful: https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671 https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5... Skip the "Removing the infinality-bundle" section if you don't currently use Infinality.

petercooper 8y ago

OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. And yet OS X's font rendering being by far the best for me is a key thing that has kept me on the Mac despite all the other warts. I find text elsewhere horribly blocky. It's all very subjective, it seems. Also, I think the grayscale antialiasing is a new thing, it certainly didn't used to be the case, but maybe they switched how it worked once retina screens became the norm.

ggm 8y ago

The bad part is that you need to do a s/objective/subjective/g on it. Once you realize it's subjective, it's a fun fine informative rant

jimbo1qaz 8y ago

https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-general.html https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener... > It turns out that font rendering in the Linux ecosystem has been wrong since scalable fonts were introduced to it. Text must be rendered with linear alpha blending and gamma correction, which no toolkit or rendering library does by default on X11, even though Qt5 and Skia (as used by Google Chrome and other browsers) can do it. The primary effect of no gamma correction is that light-on-dark text is too thin (and dark-on-light is thick but readable).