MacOS X Font Rendering vs. George Ou
August 17th, 2007 by Marcos
UPDATES BELOW
So, Daring Fireball dubbed George Ou a “jackass of the week” for this post declaring that Vista’s font rendering puts OS X “to shame.”
Alas, something went awry in Ou’s comparison because he seemed to be showing OS X’s “best for CRT” text smoothing setting. See below the difference between what Ou purports to be OS X’s font rendering and what it actually can be on an LCD.
As has been pointed out, what makes for “good” font rendering is highly subjective, but Ou could have taken the time to actually look in the Appearance preference pane and try some other settings. (I think one has to quit and re-launch a program before the new font smoothing settings take effect.)
Update By default it appears that the Mac is “automatic” which, I would assume for a laptop sets it to “Medium (Best for Flat Panel)”. I’m guessing for some reason “automatic” was producing the “Best for CRT” setting in whatever machine Ou was on - I don’t know why though.
Update II Indeed, the post has been updated as Ou’s comment suggests. I’d argue that font rendering on screen is somewhat a matter of taste. Here’s some more on the differences between Vista and OS X Font rendering. I don’t have access a Vista machine so I can’t add them myself, and Ou’s examples are a different size than mine for some reason (font sizes in browsers no doubt.) You can see all of the renderings now compared at the original post.
Update III There are many other discussions about font rendering especially now that Safari on Windows uses the Mac-style font smoothing.
George Ou Says
I updated that blog on Friday with the best LCD setting on the Mac. While it’s better than the CRT setting (on an LCD), it’s still not as clear as Vista. Your sample doesn’t show Vista and Mac LCD setting side by side and if you did that it would be quite obvious which one is superior in terms of readability.
Yes the Mac is more faithful to the font size and typography, but that’s only valid if you intend to use ridiculously large fonts on a 30″ LCD which would defeat the purpose of that large a screen. Apple is essentially prioritizing for desktop publishing when that has nothing to do with surfing the web or doing normal office productivity applications and they’re optimizing for a display technology that does not yet exist.
Aug 19th, 2007 at 6:32 pm