

Where Microsoft beats Apple (Fonts) - steadicat
http://blog.fawny.org/2010/04/12/appletype/

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stevelosh
On every Windows system I've used recently (XP and 7, I haven't touched Vista)
I cannot seem to get fonts of all sizes looking decent.

If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally)
larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think
the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts
look terrible as a result.

When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on _all_
fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost
nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't
help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result.

If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make _all_ size fonts (excluding
tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of
Windows?

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Yaa101
To answer your last sentence, no and no.

Fonts are designed for 300dpi and up and are made of mathematical vectors
instead of pixels, to make them look good on 72 and 96 dpi (Apple & MS) hacks
like hinting and antialiasing are used by the rasterizers (software that
converts mathematical vectors to pixels) in their products. They are hacks and
not real solutions as there aren't any, they have the tradeof you mention.
However I advice you to go for the hinting and antialiasing for small fonts on
screen and leave the large ones alone as long you don't display it on some
megascreen, they both will come out perfect on your printer (unless you made
bad settings or use cheap fonts). Subpixel antialiasing is mostly antialiasing
with the help of color while normal antialiasing is a grayscale one.

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epochwolf
Just a note, subtitles on DVDs are actually video layers, not text. (Closed
Captioning is text)

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ZeroGravitas
I wondered what he meant here too. He knows the difference and in fact rails
angrily against UK-English speakers because we use "subtitles" to describe
both subtitles and captions.

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epochwolf
That's just a tad ironic.

