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Recently at work we were testing a new font for the brand, won't mention the name, it's unimportant. We couldn't get it to look right on Windows. Only at a few

Recently at work we were testing a new font for the brand, won't mention the name, it's unimportant. We couldn't get it to look right on Windows. Only at a few select font sizes and weights did it look OK, at every other setup it looked like somebody took random bites out of the glyphs, meaning the individual characters had inconsistent weights. On Apple devices, we had no such issues. It seems their anti-aliasing algorithm intervenes more deeply, prioritizing a good and consistent result over theoretical integrity. You might have this same issue with thin fonts (this wasn't a thin issue) looking good on Mac and unreadable on Windows. A simple way to put it is that Mac renders font thicker (more black). I've faced the issues above for multiple custom fonts. It's why I no longer believe in the supposed best practice of fluid font sizes. I hardcode a limited set of font sizes and only those proven to look good across systems. Oh, another fun one is the glyphs of fonts having internal padding or asymmetric padding. Which messes with line heights and vertical centering. Or how about needing to tweak letter-spacing as characters overlap. I've come across all of this and more for some widely used fonts. Most are anything but ready-to-go.

mjevans 3y ago
Offhand, this might be HiDPI stuff. I haven't interacted with it myself, but upscaling for unaware applications is the first thing I would think to look at.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
The Raster Tragedy[1] creates the impression that mangling font outlines to the extent that they’re utterly unrecognizable is the fundamental mode of operation of Windows font hinting. Granted, it’s a miracle you can meaningfully render vector fonts at 96 dpi at all. I just wish a closer look at that miracle did not reveal countless eyeballs and writhing tentacles. [1] http://rastertragedy.com/ http://rastertragedy.com/
kalleboo 3y ago
I think the typical summary of the difference in Mac and Windows font rendering is that the Mac tries to get the fonts to look closer to the printed page and Windows tries to fit the lines to the pixel grid more exactly. The Mac does it's job with no regard to the sharpness or fuzziness of the rendering - e.g. it will happily render you a "one-pixel line" as two gray lines just so that it ends up aligned beautifully with the rest of the letterform, but people without HiDPI displays will complain that this is "blurry". Windows tries to fit the pixels more exactly into the pixel grid of the display to ensure sharpness and a 90's sensibility of readability. The problem here is that for any font that is not hand-hinted well at the required size, this often falls flat on its face and looks terrible. And the art of font hinting seems to have gotten lost in the 90's.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  Well put!
- heleninboodler 3y ago
  As display resolutions get higher, you get further away from needing pixel-level tweaks and hints, so it's arguable that the resolution-independent approach is better long-term. Tie yourself too closely to pixel sizes and you paint yourself into a corner so things like super-high-resolution displays (like retina) become a huge engineering problem. Back when Display PostScript was introduced, the idea of 300dpi monitors was almost ludicrous (300dpi being a standard laser printer back then), but here we are.

mjevans 3y ago

Offhand, this might be HiDPI stuff. I haven't interacted with it myself, but upscaling for unaware applications is the first thing I would think to look at.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

The Raster Tragedy[1] creates the impression that mangling font outlines to the extent that they’re utterly unrecognizable is the fundamental mode of operation of Windows font hinting. Granted, it’s a miracle you can meaningfully render vector fonts at 96 dpi at all. I just wish a closer look at that miracle did not reveal countless eyeballs and writhing tentacles. [1] http://rastertragedy.com/ http://rastertragedy.com/

kalleboo 3y ago

I think the typical summary of the difference in Mac and Windows font rendering is that the Mac tries to get the fonts to look closer to the printed page and Windows tries to fit the lines to the pixel grid more exactly. The Mac does it's job with no regard to the sharpness or fuzziness of the rendering - e.g. it will happily render you a "one-pixel line" as two gray lines just so that it ends up aligned beautifully with the rest of the letterform, but people without HiDPI displays will complain that this is "blurry". Windows tries to fit the pixels more exactly into the pixel grid of the display to ensure sharpness and a 90's sensibility of readability. The problem here is that for any font that is not hand-hinted well at the required size, this often falls flat on its face and looks terrible. And the art of font hinting seems to have gotten lost in the 90's.

dahwolf 3y ago
Well put!
heleninboodler 3y ago
As display resolutions get higher, you get further away from needing pixel-level tweaks and hints, so it's arguable that the resolution-independent approach is better long-term. Tie yourself too closely to pixel sizes and you paint yourself into a corner so things like super-high-resolution displays (like retina) become a huge engineering problem. Back when Display PostScript was introduced, the idea of 300dpi monitors was almost ludicrous (300dpi being a standard laser printer back then), but here we are.