I’ve been using windows more recently since my personal Mac bit the dust and I’m trying to decide if there’s really that much reason to own a personal Mac.
So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font rendering is not just a total and utter failure. So this is my new top Mac feature.
Some people, myself included, prefer how Windows render fonts. Others prefer MacOS.
From what I recall the last time this came up on HN, MacOS tries to render true to the font as if in a professional work flow that ends with a physical product. Windows aims for on screen legibility as it's primary goal.
Also remember that most Windows machines have a much lower DPI screen that what comes with or is hooked up to a Mac, so what is being optimized for there is also different.
Honestly hooked up to my large 1440p screen, MacOS's font rendering isn't /that/ nice, it becomes a wash vs Windows, and on a 1080p laptop I'll take Windows don't rendering.
That's a hard pill to swallow when my ability to read anything is so strained by trying to focus letters. I mean if I was just able to read the words better I'd not be complaining, that's what I want to do lol. I'm on 1440p here and microsoft sells devices with higher resolutions so I don't know how much legs this argument has to keep going on. I mean this is what I see in windows system preferences promising to make things less blurry:
So there is subpixel antiiasing, which I prefer, it works really well on lower res displays and gives you more horizontal dpi, but not all app frameworks support it (...) and some people /hate/ it.
Then there is the classic grayscale anti-aliasing.
Finally there is the nightmare of different DPI monitors.
I've also witnessed a machine (Surface Book!) that decided to start rendering all fonts in MS office applications in some weird super jaggy way like it was 1992 or something.
The fonts should never be blurry, IIRC Microsoft tries go snap characters to pixel boundaries, which is less "correct" than Apple but should be more legible.
Something is broken with you pc. What resolution have you set? In Windows you set display resolution to your monitors native resolution. And then in Scale and Layout you set the necessary scaling.
noticed the same when I first boot-camped into windows and my retina MacBooks fonts were Jacked. never noticed how nicely MacOS displays fonts till I was met with the nonsense that is windows high resolution font rendering yuck
I regularly switch between devices, platforms, and monitors. On all platforms, it really depends on the font, the application, and the hardware. For example, Windows has a really hard time if you have multiple monitors with different DPIs. Some macOS applications have trouble with some monitors. macOS itself has trouble with some monitors. It varies widely.
I remember watching a speech from Steve Jobs where he specifically said he learned about calligraphy or typefacing (I don’t remember the specific terms) to implement proper font rendering on macs. This was also before OSX came out.
It was interesting because I realized how subtly difficult font rendering is. Unless you’re using a monospaced font all of the characters have different widths, you have to figure out how to split text into lines, or how much to space text if the alignment is set to justify. In some of the fancier fonts on macOS, the characters actually change slightly if there are other characters nearby.
If I recall, what he was really saying was - when he was in college, he chose to go to some classes that weren't required, but were interesting to him, personally - one of them was on typography. He learned a bunch of non-obvious things about how fonts are designed, and how they use things like serifs for legibility, etc, etc - just this huge swath of things that he didn't necessarily "learn in depth", but he became aware of the existence of, and aware of why anyone ought to care that they exist.
So then a few years later, he's running a computer company, and it's the heyday of greenscreen, monospaced fonts. And a lot of people - without this connection to the font-making culture of western history, genuinely thought that's perfectly fine, no room-for-improvement, etc. Monospaced stuff was honest, straightforward, industrial - it didn't waste any effort on silliness like "looking pretty" (very much like soviet brutalist architecture).
As a manager, he was able to at least greenlight the idea of "wasting money" (lots of it, in fact), on decent typography, because, thanks to that education, he understood it wasn't just being done to make stuff prettier, but was actually being done to make it easier to read. That there was a powerful, utilitarian reason to do fancy fonts, not just an aesthetic one.
I don’t think it was specifically for the Mac. I think this might be from the speech he gave at Stanford where he talked about dropping his required classes and going to ones that he just was interested in. He later applied what he learned though.
There was a whole typesetting industry doing this in the 70's, with a typographic quality still unsurpassed by today's computers: AutoLogic APS-5, Compugraphic, the Pegasus font system running on DataGeneral minis.
My wife spent two years with a Surface Pro running Windows 10, and when it recently croaked we got her a new MacBook Pro. The degree of relief she had is remarkable.
It’s the little stuff like this that is just so frustrating that we can’t do this better on all platform. macOS has similar sets of flaws, it just does it better than the others. I just wish we could have a few years without new above ground features and more cleaning up quality and consistency of UI/UX features. I’d take more of that on any platform.
Honestly, on the high-dpi MacBooks (my 2015 13" rMBP and the 16" MBP), I decided to run 100% rendering (which needs to be done with Retina Display Manager). Chrome on 150% default zoom, and VSCode on zoomed in + shortcut to +/- font size easily. Most other electron based apps (Spotify/Todoist) zooms pretty well too. Pixel alignment with round scaling means much better font rendering. UI elements are a bit too small though. But worth the tradeoff to me.
So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font rendering is not just a total and utter failure. So this is my new top Mac feature.