Comments on: Text anti-aliasing: Windows’ ClearType vs. Mac OS X’s Quartz Text Smoothing

By: Patrick Wynne

Patrick Wynne — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Just a note: The first link in the argument (“ClearType technology is far superior”) actually points to one of Zeldman’s posts about his OS X troubles, not a Scoble blog entry.

By: Patrick Wynne

Patrick Wynne — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Heh heh, or y’know, I could actually *read* the Zeldman post to see that he does talk about anti-aliasing. Oops.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the correction. Scoble’s blog design leaves a bit to be desired, shall we say.

By: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Actually, if you talk with the engineers at either Apple or Microsoft, anti-aliasing, or technologies like ClearType (which really isn’t anti-aliasing, but rather a technology that uses the RGB display technology to increase resolution) are both ways to make fonts easier to read, not to make them more faithful to print.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Robert: Thanks for your comment. As I said, I’m not a specialist, and certainly do not have the inside scoop about MS or Apple technology. However, it strikes me as strange that matching print should not be the goal, since most fonts are designed specifically for print. (I know that MS in particular has developed some fonts especially for on-screen reading, but these are exceptions.) In any case, I think you will agree from the screen shot provided by Going Nowhere that Mac OS X anti-aliasing looks much closer to what the Times font looks like in print than the Windows XP anti-aliasing does. Whether that translates into the text being easier to read on-screen is obviously another matter, and a highly subjective one at that.

By: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Well, print is useful to study but now that we're creating type for on screen, we need to look at that as a separate thing than print. Learn from the old, but design for the new. Designing fonts for readability on screen (most screens are 72 DPI to 96 DPI, while print is usually 600 DPI or higher) is different than for print. Go and listen to the Bill Hill videos over on Channel9 http://channel9.msdn.com (click on videos and look for Bill Hill, he's the head of typography here).

By: Derek

Derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Robert, I agree with that old maxim about “learn from the old, design for the new” but I think that Pierre’s point here is not about designing new fonts. Clearly some beautiful work has been done on computer typefaces.

The point is about whether we can easily read text displayed on computer screens. Right? But we all learn to read on print, and that human dependence on print is not likely to change anytime soon, so then it makes sense to ask to what degree what we see on the screen is like what we see in print.

By: John Kheit

John Kheit — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I did an article on this a while back that may be of interest to the debate. To me it’s it boils down to this. At small font sizes you need to tune down the amount of “halo” effect use in the antialiasing. ClearType does that. At medium to larger sizes, having more “halo” effect smooths things nicely. I proposed a “MultipleMasters” type of approach to antialiasing as a more optimal solution. Namely the display layer should crank down the “halo” effect as you get down to smaller font sizes (say 14pt and smaller) and crank it up at higher points.

Anyway, here’s the link:

http://www.macobserver.com/columns/devilsadvocate/2003/20030523.shtml

By: Adam Sampson

Adam Sampson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Having played around with antialiased rendering for a while, I’ve found that display gamma makes a considerable different to how good it looks. If I recall correctly, Mac and Windows systems have different default gamma settings — so isn’t it quite likely that the Mac rendering model will look good on a Mac, and the Windows model good on a Windows machine?

The other thing I’ve discovered is that almost everybody has different preferences for how their text is rendered, so it’s always going to be difficult to argue that one method is superior to all others.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I agree that gamma settings probably have some impact. However, the screen shot provided by Going Nowhere can be viewed on both PCs and Macs, with their respective gamma settings. I’ve tried fooling around with the gamma setting on my monitor while viewing GN’s screen shot, and I don’t really see major variations.