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There used to be Infinality which made fonts look amazing on Linux a decade ago. https://web.archive.org/web/20151103070844/http://www.infinality.net/blog/ http

There used to be Infinality which made fonts look amazing on Linux a decade ago. https://web.archive.org/web/20151103070844/http://www.infinality.net/blog/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151103070844/http://www.infina... . Now it looks like https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671 https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5... is a good source of info on how to achieve this. macOS still probably wins on font rendering for whatever reason, but at least we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro and now https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter

wildrhythms 5y ago
I do mostly front-end development for work, I use a iMac with a 4.5k display, and the few times I start up a Windows or Linux machine and look at how it's rendered I'm really taken aback at how BAD fonts look across the board. And it's not a browser issue; across the entire OS the text just doesn't look right compared to the Mac. The strokes are too thin sometimes, too thick sometimes, edges that should be smooth are unexpectedly jagged... Maybe it's a resolution issue, maybe it's a display issue, maybe that's just how fonts are supposed to look and Mac OS has warped my perception. But they look terrible.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Could it be mostly that your Mac is rendering text with 4 times the number of pixels as comparably sized text on other displays?
- Gracana 5y ago
  > maybe that's just how fonts are supposed to look and Mac OS has warped my perception Well, Mac OS users lived with this serious rendering bug for more than a decade: https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ I remember that look well, and even thought that was how text was supposed to look. I stopped using Mac OS before that bug was fixed, so I don't know what else may be going on over there. However, there was a period where a lot of websites looked terrible on non-Macs because Mac-using designers would set really light font weights, which apparently looked fine with Apple's font rendering. Were they right, while everyone else was wrong? I don't know. Nowadays I run pretty-much-default Ubuntu linux with a 4k display, and I think fonts throughout my system and the web look great, both compared to my iPhone (which also looks great) and compared to my standard definition Windows setup at work (which looks anywhere from 'bad' to 'fine', depending on the program, font, scaling, etc).
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    > Well, Mac OS users lived with this serious rendering bug for more than a decade Er, kinda kinda-not. A lot of this article discusses subpixel AA which has been disabled by default on high DPI displays since they were introduced, for all Macs for several years, and the setting hidden in UI and eventually fully removed. Light on dark text still renders perceptually bolder regardless of measurement, and many dark mode guidelines rightly recommend using slightly lighter font variants in dark mode where that perception feels off. I made this choice with my site even where the system font is used for prose text, specifically because text in dark mode looked heavier for me. But there wasn’t a bug… this was consistent in Safari and rendering contexts that bypass macOS text rendering.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    The exact formula for glyph dilation was reverse-engineered and published at https://mobile.twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 https://mobile.twitter.com/pcwalton/status/91899145753235456.... The bug is that the formula isn't 0 for subpixel-antialiased text.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  I have mac, windows and linux computers around me right now and find macs to have by far the most terrible, atrocious blurry rendering. It makes my eyes bleed every time I have to use macOS on a non-retina screen. In contrast looking at text on my linux screen makes me consistently happy, retina or not. https://imgur.com/a/eXQ9YWR https://imgur.com/a/eXQ9YWR
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    This is mostly my experience. Text looks great on macOS as long as you're on a hi-dpi display, otherwise it looks like garbage. For a long time linux was painful - but having bit the bullet and moved to wayland, I'm pretty thrilled at how nicely both standard res and hi-dpi screens look there. I don't really mind windows either way - it's not the prettiest, but it remains fairly readable at most scales.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      > but having bit the bullet and moved to wayland, I'm pretty thrilled at how nicely both standard res and hi-dpi screens look there. ... wayland isn't supposed to change font rendering though ? It's just freetype + fontconfig + harfbuzz most of the time and AFAIK they don't operate differently under Wayland or X11 (or even if you build and use them on Win or Mac).
      - horsawlarway 5y ago
        Wayland fixing the scaling issues you hit when mixing/matching hi-dpi and standard screens. XWayland apps still have a few issues (or at least did, I've mostly moved over to native wayland everywhere now that chromium supports it) Basically - it's not font related exactly, but it definitely impacts reading text.
Doxin 5y ago
Is it me or does the font rendering in the screenshots linked in that gist all look very blurry? If I had the choice between that and whatever the default is on linux I'll take the default.

wildrhythms 5y ago

I do mostly front-end development for work, I use a iMac with a 4.5k display, and the few times I start up a Windows or Linux machine and look at how it's rendered I'm really taken aback at how BAD fonts look across the board. And it's not a browser issue; across the entire OS the text just doesn't look right compared to the Mac. The strokes are too thin sometimes, too thick sometimes, edges that should be smooth are unexpectedly jagged... Maybe it's a resolution issue, maybe it's a display issue, maybe that's just how fonts are supposed to look and Mac OS has warped my perception. But they look terrible.

tshaddox 5y ago
Could it be mostly that your Mac is rendering text with 4 times the number of pixels as comparably sized text on other displays?
Gracana 5y ago
> maybe that's just how fonts are supposed to look and Mac OS has warped my perception Well, Mac OS users lived with this serious rendering bug for more than a decade: https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ https://www.lighterra.com/articles/macosxtextaabug/ I remember that look well, and even thought that was how text was supposed to look. I stopped using Mac OS before that bug was fixed, so I don't know what else may be going on over there. However, there was a period where a lot of websites looked terrible on non-Macs because Mac-using designers would set really light font weights, which apparently looked fine with Apple's font rendering. Were they right, while everyone else was wrong? I don't know. Nowadays I run pretty-much-default Ubuntu linux with a 4k display, and I think fonts throughout my system and the web look great, both compared to my iPhone (which also looks great) and compared to my standard definition Windows setup at work (which looks anywhere from 'bad' to 'fine', depending on the program, font, scaling, etc).
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > Well, Mac OS users lived with this serious rendering bug for more than a decade Er, kinda kinda-not. A lot of this article discusses subpixel AA which has been disabled by default on high DPI displays since they were introduced, for all Macs for several years, and the setting hidden in UI and eventually fully removed. Light on dark text still renders perceptually bolder regardless of measurement, and many dark mode guidelines rightly recommend using slightly lighter font variants in dark mode where that perception feels off. I made this choice with my site even where the system font is used for prose text, specifically because text in dark mode looked heavier for me. But there wasn’t a bug… this was consistent in Safari and rendering contexts that bypass macOS text rendering.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  The exact formula for glyph dilation was reverse-engineered and published at https://mobile.twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 https://mobile.twitter.com/pcwalton/status/91899145753235456.... The bug is that the formula isn't 0 for subpixel-antialiased text.
jcelerier 5y ago
I have mac, windows and linux computers around me right now and find macs to have by far the most terrible, atrocious blurry rendering. It makes my eyes bleed every time I have to use macOS on a non-retina screen. In contrast looking at text on my linux screen makes me consistently happy, retina or not. https://imgur.com/a/eXQ9YWR https://imgur.com/a/eXQ9YWR
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  This is mostly my experience. Text looks great on macOS as long as you're on a hi-dpi display, otherwise it looks like garbage. For a long time linux was painful - but having bit the bullet and moved to wayland, I'm pretty thrilled at how nicely both standard res and hi-dpi screens look there. I don't really mind windows either way - it's not the prettiest, but it remains fairly readable at most scales.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > but having bit the bullet and moved to wayland, I'm pretty thrilled at how nicely both standard res and hi-dpi screens look there. ... wayland isn't supposed to change font rendering though ? It's just freetype + fontconfig + harfbuzz most of the time and AFAIK they don't operate differently under Wayland or X11 (or even if you build and use them on Win or Mac).
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      Wayland fixing the scaling issues you hit when mixing/matching hi-dpi and standard screens. XWayland apps still have a few issues (or at least did, I've mostly moved over to native wayland everywhere now that chromium supports it) Basically - it's not font related exactly, but it definitely impacts reading text.

Doxin 5y ago

Is it me or does the font rendering in the screenshots linked in that gist all look very blurry? If I had the choice between that and whatever the default is on linux I'll take the default.