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by rom-antics 1228 days ago
It basically patches/intercepts system-wide text drawing calls, and does its own drawing instead. There are some hints how it works here https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Secure-Boot

I played around with this back when I used Windows, maybe 5 years ago (so my opinion may be out of date). It made text look better on the laptop screen (high dpi) but worse on external monitors (low dpi). That made sense because Apple doesn't sell anything with a low dpi display, but Windows still needs to care about them, so it does a lot of extra stuff like font hinting to make rendering look good as dpi scales down.
3 comments
int_19h 1228 days ago
It was a historical distinction between the two OSes, even before Apple went all in on high-DPI.

Basically, macOS uses "ideal" font rendering, meaning that all glyph shapes and overall text size is as if they were rendered with infinite resolution and then quantized using the pixel grid; when you increase font size, the text scales linearly.

Windows, on the other hand, adjusts the shapes by snapping vertical and horizontal lines so that they correspond exactly to rows and columns of pixels. This distorts glyph shapes and spacing, but it makes small text (around 8-10pt) much more readable on low-DPI displays.

(Coincidentally, this seems to be why macOS default UI font has always been a bit larger and thicker than Windows.)

There are some screenshots to compare side by side here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...

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pathartl 1227 days ago
It's worth noting that article is from 2007 and is not fully representative of text rendering in modern Windows.
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int_19h 1227 days ago
While DirectWrite does render text a little bit differently, it still does pixel grid snapping (if you ask, which UI frameworks usually do) at least for small font sizes.
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lylejantzi3rd 1227 days ago
What's changed?
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npn 1228 days ago
> It made text look better on the laptop screen (high dpi) but worse on external monitors (low dpi).

what profile did you choose? LCD.ini make the low DPI ones looked way nicer to me, to the point I could live without it. It looked bad on high DPI ones though, so after I upgraded my monitors to 4k I just uninstalled it.

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habith 1228 days ago
> "In addition it's probably a good idea for Secure Boot to be enabled for the average user if you can."

That's a hard pass for me.

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