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by arunoda 4993 days ago
That means this is a well known issue?
4 comments

Yes, it is a well-known issue with Linux and Windows :-)

Seriously, you have to pick one: you either deform letter shapes so that they fit the grid better, with the disadvantage that your line breaks change and/or your letter and/or word spacing look awful, or you ignore the grid until the last moment, compute what percentage of each pixel is covered by each 'infinite resolution' graphene, and color them gray accordingly, with the disadvantage that text looks a bit more blurry.

(technically, there is a third way: layout each character of each font at some set of fixed point sizes by hand, so that it fits the grid perfectly. The original Mac used that method; it became infeasible when the LaserWriter shipped)

There was a post on Coding Horror (Jeff Atwood's blog) about this in 2007. I'm not meaning to be snarky, but certainly for a certain class of people, this has been well-known for a while.

Edit: sorry, forgot the link, it's here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

definitely a well-known, it's been the case ever since MacOS had antialiasing.

It's unlikely to be 'fixed' as it's a different philosophy between the OSs.

Also, as I alluded to in my previous comment, as resolutions increase in the future, the Mac OS approach is more correct in the long run. Though, it has come with the cost of fuzzy fonts and squinting for the last decade.
Does it actually make any difference? As a pixel size decreases, grid fitting becomes more accurate too.
This may not be true, as I've gotten more info above. Too late to change.
Seems like that's why they are investing more on Retina displays.
It's probably the vision that they had planned for years. Isn't that where we all want to go? I'm hoping that "Retina" becomes the new standard everywhere within the next few years.
As well known as printers have a higher DPI than monitors.