| Macs do weird stuff with font compositing, try toggling subpixel rendering in CSS [0] and watch the weight of your type completely change. :- ) Whatever they're doing, at least one of these modes has to be wrong. Windows is a complete mess when it comes to text display, but that's nothing new, although to be fair to them, they do not screw this particular thing up. FreeType2 in Firefox or a Chromium-based browser on X11/Wayland is spectacular, especially following the expiry of many ClearType-related patents, and the Adobe's contributions; with the various fontconfig settings which change the output, it doesn't noticeably change the weight (for a given size) for modes that people actually want to use (nobody's going back to v35). OSX has an interesting approach, and if they could resolve their blending/filtering/rasterization/whatever (god only knows where their problems lie) problems; a lot of people like the tradeoff of legibility for accurate text sizes in a given weight, and that's OK. [0]: Usually accomplished with -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased or -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale CSS rules to disable subpixel rendering (because OSX still doesn't do it right) are littered all over the internet. Here's a random blog post from the front page of HN which has it applied to the body text probably because OSX made the text look inexplicably terrible for no good reason by default:
http://ajroach42.com/floppycasts-1-44mb-podcasts/ There's a reason this CSS property doesn't actually do anything on other platforms. |