The above comments should make it clear: Apple’s font rendering is clearly inferior, to your eye, because your eye is used to Microsoft’s font rendering.
Microsoft’s font rendering, to my eye, is clearly inferior. By a strange coincidence, my eye is used to Apple’s rendering.
The Windows rendering seems full of jaggies. Sorry, hands down, the Apple sub-pixel rendering, to this eye, appears better.
Re: Daniel Robbins:
Amazing, how far Mac fans will go to prove their point. This discussion just went along the line of Mac vs. PC commercials.
“Apple’s approach would be preferred by people who prefer purity of form over absolute readability.”
What people? For all the people reading news, blogs etc. on the Web, or writing code, or using, hmm, spreadsheets – readability is an absolute priority.
I’m not gonna stare at “a body of perfectly kerned text, with correctly rendered typeface” - I’m interested in actually READING words and trying to extract some meaning from it.
Graphic designers, on the other hand, use “greek text below Xpt.”, that it choose not to render fonts at all when it doesn’t make sense. But this is a tiny minority of mere mortals using computers in their daily lives.
I switched to a Mac recently, going on 4-5 months now, after…when did the 2.11 come out? A long time on Windows. When I first started with the Mac, I HATED the fonts. I fought with the system preferences bitterly, realized there was nothing I could do about it, and gave up. Funny thing - now when I go back to Windows, I find the text just barely readable. I guess I’ve been assimilated.
This might sound silly, but font rendering on the Mac is one of the reasons I switched to OS X. Its that much better to me.
There’s something just not right with the Vista rendering. It’s too tight, and the white/black balance is off to me. My eyes hurt from reading it, so much that I turned aliasing off on my ClearType-enabled PC at work.
At home with OSX on an LCD, it just feels right. Maybe that’s an edge Apple has here over Mac: they looked beyond the technology and how tightly they could compress text on the screen. Maybe it’s just what you’re used to over time.
I’m sorry, my Re: was incorrectly addressed.
Daniel actually said the same thing as myself, that people interested in readability would prefer Microsoft’s ClearType (I actually don’t use it either, just get by with MS Verdana and Tahoma, which look good without any anti-aliasing).
Statements like “…Apple’s font rendering… looks more like a what you’d see on a piece of paper. The Windows method looks like a “computer” display.” strike me as odd. An LCD is nothing like a piece of paper. The printed fonts are not anti-aliased, unless we’re talking about cheap newspaper print. For the purpose of displaying characters in 8pt size, 96dpi is nothing like 300dpi.
So the bottom one clearly displays a different page, right? I mean, it refers to some company names Juiusoft, whereas the top one refers to Jujusoft.
OK, I’m being snarky, but seriously, is it more readable when you can’t even see the curved letter in an underlined “j”? That immediately leaped out at me.
I’m tempted to say “Well, it’s just what you’re used to,” except my clients will never let me use CSS to style text for main navigation on web pages. They insist on graphics because the “fonts look better”–meaning rendered by something other than Windows. Then they see it on the Mac and suddenly they get why I’m OK with the more accessible styled text.
And if you’re talking about any non-roman script, like Arabic, it’s not even close.
wow, i never thought anyone thought the windows font rendering was good, but i guess i was wrong. to me, the one on top looks about 10x better, and i would always choose it over the IE example.
Excuses for the “me too” reply, I’ll post this for statistical reasons. At first I thought “was that a typo or did he accidentally switch the images?” - to my eye, the Apple rendering clearly looks better. I wonder if there’s any research that could explain why some people prefer the Apple rendering while others like the Windows engine better.
(for the record: I’m using Mac OS X and Kubuntu on a daily basis and I never use Windows).
Parveen Said:
Since I don’t wear glasses, I’m siding with Apple with this one. Apple’s core kernel is called Darwin. It seems they prefer the genetically superior. 
I say:
If you don’t wear glasses, it’s only because you haven’t spent enough time looking at computer screens. (Old man voice) “When I was your age, the world was green and black and dot matrix…”
The IE version is not even close to accurate. To me it’s obvious that OS X renders better, in the bigs and the smalls. I can’t believe this is even being discussed.
Interesting. When I first switched to a MacBook 6 months ago, I found the font rendering quite blurry. I did my best to make it look like ClearType, but then gave up and forgot all about it after a week. It no longer looks blurry, and after reading some comments here and taking a second look at the ClearType example, I now think that ClearType looks thin but somehow confused (the ‘i’ and ‘l’ are all squashed together, whereas in OS X they have much better spacing around them).
So my conclusion is, it all depends on what you’re used to. I know a lot of people hate ClearType in XP and leave it turned off, although myself I liked it. Now I’m used to Apple, and while I THINK it looks blurry, its clearly just as readable, if not more readable, than ClearType. By the way, I wear glasses.
Completely agree with shiza. The Microsoft method is just what you’re used to. It is, however, /horribly inaccurate/. Show the fonts to anyone with any knowledge of typography. There’s no chance they’d prefer the cleartype.
The MS type is obviously more “crisp” but the mac type is by far more readable IMO unless I stick my face less than a foot from the screen. I do wear glasses w/ a good prescription (not old) so that really has nothing to do with it.
Fonts are built very carefully (well, the good ones) to balance white space, serifs (when used), the curving of letters, etc. to increase readability and allow a readers eyes to naturally flow through the text without effort. The MS way of rendering it completely ruins this and makes my eye have to strain more to read it. If you just look at the type and say “hey, this one is crisper therefore better” of course you like the MS type, if you sit back and actually try to read a paragraph the Mac type is MUCH easier to read.
As a note, I am a Mac user but not what you’d call a “fanboy”, whenever there are new advancements on any platform I thoroughly check into them and if MS came out with something I thought was better I would definitely switch w/ out a problem.
On both my laptops and my home CRT and work LCD Mac fonts just look like JUNK no matter the px or if I have my glasses on or not. The Mac just hurts my eyes.
Who cares if a font is “correct” design wise if it looks like crap and hurts your eyes to read? READABILITY thats ALL that matters in fonts.
This certainly eye opening. To me the Mac font rendering is superior by a order of magnitude… like not even close. To be ClearType looks like absolute garbage.
I am really quite stunned that something that seemed so absolute and unequivocal to me can actually be so subjective. Wow.
The Mac’s font rendering was actually one of the things that made me decide to stop using Windows at home.
I don’t use Safari on the Mac - I prefer Firefox - but I might use it on Windows if it renders fonts the way I like them.
While Safari’s rendering is certainly smoother, it’s too heavy and even has uneven weight… The capital T’s are glaringly heavier than the surrounding text. Lower case r’s and f’s look top-heavy because they’re not even between the stem and the top. I’m sure I could get used to either, but Microsoft’s rendering just looks cleaner because the letters don’t bleed together. (and FWIW, I do not wear glasses)
Those from the Windows platform are definitely having problems with the type rendering because it’s a shift from what they’re used to.
Putting aside a Mac vs. PC debate, from a purely typographical standpoint OS X is clearly the superior platform in this regard. The reason being is that Apple has chosen to maintain the integrity of the typeface rather than distort it. Why? Well, why do you think type designers spend so much time over seemingly insignificant details? It has a direct impact on the legibility of the type. Shape and form matter immensely.
Those without a background in graphic design or typography will have a hard time with this, but rest assured the details certainly do matter, much more than simply the “crispness” of the type. From what I saw above, Microsoft’s ClearType distorts type so the legibility of the individual characters are worse and the kerning is sacrificed–breaking the flow from letter to letter and word to word.
Compare a serifed typeface like Garamond (not Georgia, as it makes specific concessions to a computer display) on a Mac vs a PC and the details become even more important. The weight of the individual serifs aid legibility, but not unless the form of the type is preserved.
Apple, in my opinion is going the right direction with this. The only reason Microsoft’s ClearType is the way it is is because of the relatively low resolution of screen displays compared to print. Print is often at 200 to 300 dpi, while a 130 is considered excellent on a computer screen. As dpi gets better on computer screens, the difference–and superiority–of Apple’s technique will be clearer (forgive the pun) and clearer.