
Apple's font rendering vs. Microsoft's - why do Windows users dislike Safari's fonts? - Sam_Odio
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
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nickb
What Joel doesn't get (or at the very least 'forgot' to write down) is that as
the pixel density of the screens (DPI) increases, MS's method will fall apart.
Apple's tech is clearly superior in that respect. Just look at the iPhone...
it has a "huge" (by today's LCD standards anyway) pixel density and Apple's
font rendering looks really amazing.

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amichail
I don't see why. Could you elaborate? Won't they both look good with higher
DPI?

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celoyd
He's pointing out that the Windows algorithm uses a lot of tricks to
compensate for the low resolution of screens compared to paper. As screens
approach the crispness of paper, those tricks will become pointless
distortions. In a roughly similar way, fonts designed to come through clearly
in faxes tend to look dumbed-down in print.

There's another issue here which I haven't seen mentioned -- OS X assumes, by
default, that displays have a gamma of 1.8, while 2.2 is traditional on
Windows. For everyday non-graphics work, the difference is lost in the
varition between monitors, but it will tend to make Windows antialiasing look
slightly too heavy on Macs and vice-versa. (Once I noticed it, it was easy to
spot screenshots of ClearType on my Mac LCD -- it's too colorful and "sparkly"
compared to the system antialiasing.) If Apple didn't account for this, it may
add to the confusion.

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mark-t
Joel doesn't really examine any of the down sides to sticking with the MS font
renderer. It might cause problems with Safari internals, since various DOM
components and style attributes will depend on font sizes and spacing. It
might add to the annoyance of web development, since Safari on Windows
wouldn't do the same thing as Safari on Mac. However, I suspect they had to
work around tons of similar issues, anyway.

