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by citrin_ru
1781 days ago
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> For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes with pixel boundaries which produces sharper letterforms at the cost of distortion of the aesthetic personality of the font Fully agree that it is a personal preference: a slightly distorted shape is something I stop to notice after a day of using the system (I adapt to whatever shape font has unless it is badly distorted like in FreeType with some settings). Blurry fonts on other hand are always look blurry for me. Personal anecdata: I use MacOS daily and FreeBSD every few days, but when once in a while I boot Windows 7 I always pleasantly surprised how nice and sharp windows fonts look; it is especially noticeable if I compare small font sizes across the systems. |
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The Mac rendering while a little less sharp means letters always have roughly the same shape, as intended by the typeface authors, while the Windows anti-aliasing distorts them unpredictably depending on where and which pixels they fall onto. Two ‘a’s might look slightly different within the same word because they fall into different alignments on the pixel grid. This is what gives it the wonky appearance.