joelonsoftware.com — Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy.
Jun 13, 2007 View in Crawl 4
damentzJun 13, 2007
Personally, you can make fonts look a lot nicer in Linux if you know how. For instance, set your dpi to 96 and if you use debian, run 'dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config' and enable autohinter and disable bitmap fonts. Suprise, your fonts look extremely smooth and sharp.Prime example --> <a class="user" href="http://www.divshare.com/image/614191-3c9">http://www.divshare.com/image/614191-3c9</a>
meatmcguffinJun 13, 2007
"If you have to read the tooltip in order to find out what something does, then it's non-intuitive by definition."Without tooltips, Window's buttons would just be three square boxes, or can you guess each one's function by location alone?. OS X just keeps the tooltips hidden until you mouse over them. There's no real difference.There is a benefit in that you soon associate an action with a colour and it makes them a lot easier to identify and hit compared to the identical looking square boxes.
r3zonanceJun 13, 2007
@doppler00"How many people still print what they see on their screen and read it in this age?"Have you ever seen this elusive "paperless office" they've been talking about forever? Cos I certainly NEVER have. Most people I know, Windows/Mac, still prefer printed copy to something on screen, this is especially the case for the older generation.The paperless office will never exist.
r3zonanceJun 13, 2007
Same here, most of day spent working on-screen, but I prefer the Mac way of font smoothing still. ClearType still looks too artificial.
gotamdJun 13, 2007
Yeah, that's pretty much what the article boils down to. That part was informative (I'd always wondered why text looks like s**t on Macs...though it's better than Linux).
andburn1Jun 14, 2007
Laptop. :(
Closed AccountJun 14, 2007
> If you use Anti-Aliasing and turn hinting off, fonts look *identical* to what > you have on OS X.I wish! If only font rendering were that easy. Put them side by side and it's no comparison. But if you've never used OS X then it's easy to see how one would think that it looks "identical".