If you’re a designer, you couldn’t live with Windows’ way of anti-aliasing fonts. It’s just too light, the fontprinted would look darker and a bit thicker.
The OS X way of rendering(!) - not anti-aliasing - fonts is closer to the way the font is supposed to look like. Why, because except for Georgia and a few screen-only fonts, 99% of the fonts on your system were initially designed for print. Apple is just trying to show you the fonts the way they are supposed to look and not some pixelated close but different resemblance of the same.
Paper is an old paradigm. The new standard - and it has been the de facto standard for several years now - is using an LCD screen as the default reading medium by an overwhelming majority.
This means, effectively, Microsoft is right and Apple is wrong. It is not a matter of taste but facing up to reality in a practical and pragmatic manner.
Of course, when it comes to facing up to reality, Mac users have historically demonstrated a rather feeble lack of competence. Massive self-delusion is the norm in the Mac world. This is why there are so many arrogant and ignorant Mac users.
The Mac does certain things better. Font rendering ain’t one of them. That’s the bottom line.
In Safari, under PreferencesAppearance, you can change the “Font Smoothing.” By default it’s set at “Medium.” “Light” looks more like Windows, and “Strong” is darker and fuzzier.
Overall, Safari is the coolest browser, and I have no trouble reading its fonts. I don’t think it’s worth searching for complaints about Apple at sub-pixel level…
Benoit nailed it. It comes down to reading style. I prefer the Safari/Mac rendering, but I read word shapes when I’m reading for content. If I’m creating large documents and need to proof the content on-screen (and I mean proof for content, not for design), then I’ll print to PDF and do my reading there. The misaligned and misshapen characters in any of the reasonably-powerful Windows word processors and (non-Adobe) layout tools don’t allow me to see the content of my content – all I get is a character array, and I don’t read that way.
On the other hand, as a developer I work with character accuracy in mind, and I see things differently. Unaliased monospaced fonts with unambiguous character shapes are king in that world. Font smoothing of any sort makes my job a lot harder.
Apple has choosen to render fonts more like they look and how they will turn out in print, Microsoft have choosen to try to force them into the pixels on the display.
Both ways got the bad and good things, what we need is displays with a higher DPI instead anyway, but Windows doesn’t work good on high DPI displays so we never seem to get any
I’m a user of KDE on Linux and honestly, I don’t mind either ClearType or Apple’s font rendering methods as I have no difficulty in reading text rendered with either of them. However, I still tend to choose Apple’s method over ClearType as it just looks better and more natural to me. IMO it’s just a matter of personal taste, really.
“when it comes to facing up to reality, Mac users have historically demonstrated a rather feeble lack of competence. Massive self-delusion is the norm in the Mac world. This is why there are so many arrogant and ignorant Mac users.”
You misspelled “Hey kettle, you’re black!” Hope this helps.
In Safari, under PreferencesAppearance, you can change the “Font Smoothing.” By default it’s set at “Medium.” “Light” looks more like Windows, and “Strong” is darker and fuzzier.
Overall, Safari is the coolest browser, and I have no trouble reading its fonts. I don’t think it’s worth searching for complaints about Apple at sub-pixel level…
Simply put, Apple prefers accuracy over readability, which reflects their long-time relationship with print and graphics industries. This is even more visible with Leopard’s new Resolution Independance, a feature that can be called innovative by those who will actually make use of it, and that can be… meh. For those who don’t care.
I personally prefer accuracy, but that’s just a matter of taste, I suppose.
The Windows rendering seems full of jaggies. Sorry, hands down, the Apple sub-pixel rendering, to this eye, appears better.
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This is interesting, because I downloaded and installed the Safari beta yesterday and for me, the fonts don’t render AT ALL. I get absolutely no text in the browser window, or in the status bar, or under the navigation items. Nothing.
Well, that’s enough for me to switch to Safari… if it isn’t interfering with a certain DLL files…
The anti-aliasing actually looks nearly as good as OS X’s, and I’ve always hated Windows’ pseudo-font smoothing. Smaller font sizes make the text look geeky, but would print out as a smaller version of the font (which it should be). Apple is taking a few steps forward with realistic anti-aliasing, and it’s really what-you-see-is-what-you-print.
