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> 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

> 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.

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.