#Smooth font windows full#
#Smooth font windows code#
#Smooth font windows windows 8#

When this blog post got featured on Reddit and HackerNews, a number of people pointed out that prior to Mojave, which was the latest release at the time the post was written, OS X used to have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, text rendering was great, I was wrong and Apple did not deserve the hate. DonвЂ™t believe me? Do a controlled reading speed experiment against Windows.

This distracts your subconsciousness and wastes attention on just recognizing glyphs and their edges, resulting in massive eye strain. There is not even a hint of any consistency in the rendering either, thickness is all over the place even within a single glyph, with different strokes вЂњstickingвЂќ together because of the lack of pixels: This combination makes everything appear very bold and blurry: It does not use hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. OS X has the absolute worst font rendering from the readability aspect. I donвЂ™t see colour fringing, so my preference is 39/DWrite/v2.0 rendering of Windows 7.

#Smooth font windows code#

This is how FreeType code in /include/freetype/ftdriver.h documents Windows font rendering evolution over time: GETINFO

#Smooth font windows windows 8#

Windows 7 had the sharpest fonts, while from Windows 8 onwards Microsoft went back to grayscale font smoothing, resulting in blurrier fonts without colour fringing. Windows font rendering keeps changing with every new version of the OS. They can disable this feature at the cost of less sharp fonts or migrate to Windows 8 or newer. A small percentage of people can see so well, that they actually notice this when reading. Since sub-pixel rendering relies on toggling red, green and blue parts of a single pixel, it introduces colour fringing.

One obvious thing you can see on the zoomed in part of the image is that black and white text is not actually black and white on Windows 7. Simply put, Windows uses every font rendering improvement technology available and goes a step further to use fonts specifically designed to look great when combined with this technology. To get Windows-like rendering that I prefer, anti-aliasing, sub-pixel rendering, sub-pixel positioning and font hinting based on byte code embedded into fonts - basically, every step of the technological progress made in the last 30 years - need to be active.

#Smooth font windows full#

You can read up more here and here if you want the full background.Д®ach operating system approaches font rendering differently. Most notable are sub-pixel rendering, sub-pixel positioning, font hinting and anti-aliasing. Computer displays are low-DPI devices for complex reasons, and such DPI (96) is not enough to display fonts without a myriad of trade-offs. Basic conceptsДЇonts are vector data that gets rasterized when displayed to the user. There are also some facts you canвЂ™t argue with, such as non-linear rendering without anti-aliasing looking awful. I also agree with research which suggests that this rendering approach makes reading easier on the eyes. I spent the first 25 years of my life on Windows and therefore I am biased towards Windows font rendering with ClearType. If you donвЂ™t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost.

As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic.