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.[...] Thanks to moojj for providing this nice story on Digg (more than 1936 Diggs).
What other user say about this:
dmckey: I use both mac and win, the mac side I find I can use/read longer then when I’m using the win side before my eyes get tired. I wonder if anyone has notice on a mac using a lcd display the lines in the “=” sign are two different shades of what ever font colour being used.and to be honest I am a vista fanboy, at least until leopard comes out.
horvatic: I think you guys need glasses. I’m using safari right now and it is as clear as a bell. I see no bluryness in any website I’ve been to.
betelgeuse68: Responding to freehunter’s concern that that the author that the link points to isn’t a “PC Fanboy” on account of giving kudos to Jobs… (and the 85 people who dugg it).
Joel Spolsky used to work at Microsoft and founded a company whose products are for Windows. He’s blogged about software development for years and most of his antecdotes come from a decidedly Microsoft centric world, not LINUX, not Macintosh but Windows.
-M
hollywoodphony: If this is a repeat of someone else’s comment, I apologize, I gave up after going through 150 of them.
I am someone who doesn’t have the best vision. Even with reading glasses, it can be hard for me to see fonts on my Mac. It isn’t just that they’re “blurry”, everything seems to be smaller, even at the same font size and resolution. In addition, sometimes my Mac will decide that certain windows it displays just have to be teeny tiny, for (seemingly) no reason.
I have a Mac and a PC pumped into the same monitor via a KVM. Bottom line: everything is much easier to read on my PC, across the board.
Does anyone have any tips for improving the ease with which I can read things on my screen when I’m using my Mac? The typical “accessibility” options are really more for blind people. I just have very bad vision. I don’t need to see letters that are 1/4 of the screen. Just not so small.
If your suggestion is “buy some new glasses” you are very clever and original.
SweetMercury: A lot of the quality of the rendering, I suspect, has to do with the moniter as well (as well as the OS).
Safari fonts look blurry (to the point of hurting my eyes at the end of the day), on my 17/19 in desktop flatscreens (home/work respectively, both with 1280×1024 res).
But, Safari fonts look fine on my Dell laptop–15″ widescreen, 1680×1050 res, so a much finer resolution. And, I think Safari looks fine on my friend’s Macbook (not sure of the res) with OSX.
I know that Apple has a thing for the “uniformity” of user experience, but they might want to rethink this aspect of it. The solution is an option to allow the Windows OS to format type (cleartype or no-smoothing at all).
alansky: The answer to the question “why Apple fonts appear blurry” (to Windows users running Safari for Windows) is: blurry eyeballs. Windows users have blurry eyeballs. Some people say that this condition begins to reverse itself after three months of using a Mac.
Cyber_Akuma: Ok, so putting the obvious mac-praising and microsoft-bashing bias of the article aside, this is basically what he is saying right?
Apple tries to make the fonts render closer to what they actually look like at the cost of some blurryness.
Microsoft tries to make the fonts fit the pixels on the screen so they can look sharp at the cost of some detail accuracy.
Apple’s method is better for doing graphic design or laying out a page for print.
Microsoft’s method is better for viewing and reading text on-screen.
blakespot: I wish Apple (or Microsoft’s) subpixel rendering worked properly in a dual screen scenario where one screen is rotated…
krizzle: Because apple users have cum in their eyes. Discuss. If I get 20 digg downs I win a 10 dollar bet. Hop to it
skyscape: Thats another reason why I got rid of mac and went with PC
freemaverick: And what do you think how many 17″ 1920×1200 displays are out there?
Anyway some standard (at least in the PC world) today is more like 17″ or 19″ in 1280×1024 and thats I believe is under 100dpi. Enjoy your MacBook Pro, it has great fonts (or at least close to be great) I have no doubts on that.
Chronic: Give me my clear, non-blurry fonts please.. those silly mac users can keep there blurry fonts, as well as pay for reading glasses in 5 years when they destroy their eyes trying to read blurry type at 1280×1024.
freemaverick: Actually the iPhone does something no other phone can, it browse the internet in a way a standard PC or Mac does, full. It has a full feature browser (Safari). And I believe the font rendering is awesome on iPhone, because it has a 160dpi resolution display, and ClearType or Mac or any other sub-pixel rendering is not appropriate for anything less than 120dpi, and unfortunately nobody has a 120dpi display at home. But in the future… well both will be great, right now i prefer no smoothing for less than 12pt fonts (especially not in system – menus, buttons etc.) and for larger fonts anti aliasing works well, so this sub-pixel rendering is good only for small fonts on high resolution (120+ dpi displays) on anything else its make me puke. (and I am a graphic designer btw.)
capran: I wonder if all this “controversy” will be moot when monitors approach the DPI of the printed page? I think a monitor that could do 600 DPI would be absolutely breathtaking. We’d need vectorized graphics and fonts, of course, which Leopard and Vista have, in order to prevent everything from being microscopic like it would be on a bitmapped display system like XP (previous versions of OS X use vectors for graphics, but I believe “resolution independence” is a big feature in Leopard, am I wrong?)
LegendOfLink: “Typically, Apple chose the stylish route, putting art above practicality, because Steve Jobs has taste”
I don’t agree. Apple chose this route because of their original core base of users: graphic artists. Steve Jobs doesn’t have taste, he knows who his customers are, and how to make them happy.
