Font Rendering: Apple vs Microsoft
Just to prove Microsoft can still do some things better.
Does anyone know if there’s any reason why font rendering would be different on different platforms?
–Edit–
Codinghorror seems to be slashdotted or otherwise down. Here’s a graphic from the original post which shows what we’re talking about: the top line is safari, the bottom line is IE with ClearType.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
It doesn’t have to be, it’s just down to their implementation. You can fiddle with it on Windows too with the ClearType Tuner PowerToy for XP:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/7/0/b7019730-0fa3-47a9-a159-98b80c185aad/setup.exe
It took me a long time to get used to ClearType after loving crisp fonts for so long, but now I’m really used to it and wouldn’t want to go back.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Font smoothing can be adjusted (slightly) from System Preferences on the apple. I’d imagine safari on the mac takes the relevant settings from there.
I wonder if safari on windows is using a default or a fall-back font smoothing setting? I should really get off my ass and download a copy and see if there’s something extra in the options.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
There’s meant to be an option in Safari that lets you adjust (between 3 settings?) how text is displayed. Why it doesn’t use the built in ClearType settings, I’m not entirely sure. Possibly because Windows versions of Mac programs tend to be rather poorly ported across.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Having downloaded a copy, I’ve found the three settings you’re talking about. Probably won’t get time to compare the different options until I get home, though.
I think mac users still have more rights to complain about badly ported software than the other way around
I wonder if the problem is related to the traditionally different white points of mac and windows screens?
Coding horror seems to be slashdotted: I’ll try to find a little shot for comparison.
June 13th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
The consensus seems to be that the Windows version of Safari ows it existence, at least partly, to people’s need to have a testbed for the iPhone, and so its visual settings are made to match. Which doesn’t answer the question why the iPhone would have soft, blocky rendering like that, or why they haven’t made the thing programmable…
June 15th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Interesting follow up:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html
Paraphrasing, apple is optimised for print, microsoft for screen; apple is truer to the font, microsoft is easier to read.
I’m still with microsoft on this one: print views should be true to the font, but if something is designed for the screen, surely the most important thing is that it’s readable?