My font smoother design is far superior to microsofts.
Anyone who disagrees with me is just not a visionary.
PS. Buy an iPhone.
1 out of 10 Windows users know that ClearType even exists. The 1 that discovers it is always gloating how much better Windows is at font rendering compared to, what, the Apple Newton?
How quickly we forget about IE 6, sans ClearType. (Today’s “leading” combo, no?) Imagine, now that you actually can, what it has been like to design a website with Safari as your main dev browser, using fonts for your h1-h5 to save bytes, and then check it in IE 6. Ouch. A thing of beatuty totally wasted.
Yeah. Good title.
I’m down with the argument that it’s dependent on usage.
If I’m reading text for the information contained within, readability at smaller point sizes is often an issue. For that purpose, hinting such as ClearType can be beneficial.
If I’m producing graphical work, or reading something which has aesthetic value as well as content value, I’d like to see the fonts as they were intended - and in those circumstances it’s a constant frustration to me that Windows just doesn’t do that: small fonts simply look nothing like they should.
On balance, I’d rather have Apple’s faithful rendering, and pick my fonts carefully for “readability-priority” functions such as a default browser font.
And I say that as a lifelong Windows user 
I’ve just discovered that, in OS X, you can turn off smoothing for fonts under a certain (user defined) size. Also, OS X tends to use both sub-pixel rendering AND anti-aliasing in order to try and diminish the visual noise incurred by the sub-pixel rendering.
My machine (XP/20" LCD @ 1600x1200) doesn’t have the Calibri font, so I get your site rendered in Tahoma. I have to say that your site looks decidedly better to me in Safari, while Google (Arial) looks slightly better in IE. Overall, I think I like the slight blurriness of Safari over the angularity of IE.
Look at the lower-case ‘e’ in “Advanced Search” to the right of the Google search box. The letterform is so different you might think they aren’t using the same type face: in Safari the bowl of the ‘e’ curves back up on the right-hand side, while in IE the bowl of the e ends with a straight horizontal line.
Looking at the ‘e’ in larger point sizes, it’s clear that the bowl is curved in the pure (unrendered) letterform.
As many have said, which you prefer depends on who you are. But I can see why type designers or graphics layout people would like the Apple approach.
I think the fonts are not the problem with Safari. I prefer them, in fact.
Here’s the real story of where Apple’s beta falls short:
Their browser launches in a window that doesn’t play well with Windows standards. I can’t, for example, resize it except by using the Apple resize triangle in the lower right corner (and the ability to resize windows from any edge or corner is one place where Windows totally has it right compared to OS X). Nor can I control-select, say, the IE and Safari apps in my system tray and right click to display them side-by-side onscreen. XP just thinks that IE is running.
This is where Apple is acting with hubris…Just because windows work one way on the Mac, doesn’t make it a good idea to break the Windows paradigm (i.e., override the behavior that the user expects).
Macs generally use around 100dpi, higher for laptops.
That’s physically 100dpi, but the software in Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier still thinks in 72dpi. So currently on a Mac, the higher the physical resolution, the smaller stuff (a letter, an icon, etc.) appears.
If the Mac thinks the icon is an inch wide, it uses 72 pixels across to draw that icon. On a high-rez Mac Pro screen, if you hold a ruler up to the screen, that icon might measure only 0.6 inches (or some such number).
This will change in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” with the software drawing at any resolution you choose. If you want, you can use more physical pixels to draw the same letter with more smoothing or the same icon with more detail, but fewer of those letters icons can appear on screen.
Apple’s approach to font smoothing will really pay off then, as text on future high density monitors will appear more and more like ink on paper. But Microsoft rendering will look more and more goofy and “computer-like”.
First of all, I’d like to point out that unless you bother to tune ClearType to your individual monitor, it’s not going to look good so go do that first.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/tune.aspx
Another reason that people have trouble with ClearType is that if the display resolution of Windows isn’t set to match the native resolution of the LCD monitor it isn’t going to look good (generally I find that nothing else looks right either).
Second, with all of these opinions flying around, did nobody bother to do any research? Let me help:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cleartype+readability+studyform=QBRE
For those who don’t trust Microsoft:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=cleartype+readability+study
Meh, Apple could stick an icepick in peoples’ eyes and kill their grandma and they would still rave about how much better OS X is.
I don’t have a problem with either Windows or Mac font rendering. They both look great in my estimation. By contrast, font rendering on Linux is absolutely horrendous. Hinting is poorly implemented – stroke widths tend to be somewhat uneven – and colour fringing with sub pixel rendering is painful. It even manages to make the Windows core fonts look ugly.
I’m surprised that Safari looks so wrong under windows, as it looks correct on a Mac. Hopefully by the time it comes out of beta they will have sorted the rendering issues. I’m convinced that Safari must be using some different method of rendering compared with iTunes under windows.
I’m not convinced that even altering the appearances under preferences makes it any better. It’s slightly easier on the eye but you can see where the characters look thicker than they should.
I’m really surprised that nobody has mentioned that clear type is not anti-aliasing in the traditional sense. It only works on flat panels, and is optimised for the positioning of the diodes that make up a single pixel.
James McKay, you don’t say whether it is KDE or GNOME you are using. I prefer the look of Firefox under GNOME to both ClearType and the Mac method. It certainly doesn’t look uneven to me.
Cleartype alone is hideous, it leaves horizontal strips without any anti-aliasing at all. Its a complete disaster and can really strain my eyes after long periods. I’m ecstatic that I can now enjoy decent text when browsing on windows.
Most windows users complaining are too used to no-antialias or Cleartype which could hardly be considered antialais
The Safari text rendering has higher production values. I make site designs in Photoshop and the text ends up looking basically the same once the Web site is created if you look at it in Safari there is never any need to make an image. The Windows text rendering looks like a computer. Also the Mac rendering looks the same on screen or in print or on tomorrow’s 300 dpi display.
How you view this has a lot to do with what you’re used to. When I see a site in Explorer I always think WTF is wrong with this PC? So I guess here we’re seeing someone go the other way, looking at Safari.
Also someone told me once that Windows has to be “extra clear” because there are a lot of analog displays on PC’s. Even many LCD’s (digital displays) are hooked up with VGA (analog cable) just to save the cost of the digital cable. This adds a lot of blur, it makes an LCD into a CRT, if you are working with that then you are not even in the digital universe yet, you are watching it on TV.
The Apple fonts are blurry, period. Admit it, for God’s sake. The “rendering” is inferior and everybody knows it. Also, who cares if it’s “truer to print”? Most people use a computer to read information on the computer, not to print out accurate typefaces on pages. At least now with the release of Safari 3 for Win the world can see the Apple scam with their own eyes.
suddenly everybody has an opinion!!
A “200% exact pixel resize” doesn’t make any sense in a subpixel font rendering context.
To my eye, ClearType is better than the Apple rendering. Apples looks, well, just blurred, out of focus. Apple’s fonts may be ‘truer’ - and they do look more ‘beautiful’ - but they aren’t as readable.
That said, it’s hard to be sure what’s better. Look at the factors - screen type (CRT? LCD?) and resolution, distance from screen, text size, font used, colours, eyeballs, possibly colour-blindness, maybe glasses or contacts - you’re never going to have a definite answer for all people. A survey is your best hope…
But for me, on this machine, the way I work - ClearType. Readability is king.
On the “72 dpi” thing.
This was so back in the days of the 9" display compact Mac; 72dpi to match typesetter’s points.
Hasn’t been true on screen for a while; actual display DPI is identical to a PC with the same resolution and physical size (obviously).
(BooBoo: Aren’t many/most things at the software level spec’d as Ipixels/i rather than notional inches, anyway?
Certainly it ought to be possible, if Apple’s APIs are anything like everyone else’s, even though they allow device-independent sizing. I don’t do OSX development, so I can’t speak from experience as far as OSX implementation.
The issue is, at any rate, no different on a Windows-running PC; the PC doesn’t know what your physical DPI might be; Windows only has 96 and 120 options unless you do a custom one, and nobody does that [figurative nobody, of course].
Given the variations in resolution and physical size, that’s all going to be a crapshoot on screen until either people actually set their OS DPI level correctly, or it’s clever enough [using DCC and a table of monitor physical sizes/layouts and the known resolution] to calculate a DPI value and apply it … and that only even matters if the software is doing its drawing by notional size rather than by pixel.
“Best practice” these days leans to the former, but people often don’t follow notional best practices.)
I think it’s hilarious, by the way, that PWH3Troll ignores all the data about conflicting opinions, all admitted by those proffering them to be Isubjective judgement/i, and just ignores the half that doesn’t suit the troll. Bravo.
The Windows version is actually somewhat harder for me to read. It seems way too wispy/wiry, and almost like it’s of less opacity. Factor in my slight astigmatism and it’s even worse.
I mean, it’s not too huge a difference either way, but the Apple version just seems generally easier to read, and more… there, I guess. More like text you’d read on paper.