Here’s something a little different.
If you’re new to Mac OS X, from Windows or Linux, you’ve probably noticed the dramatic difference in font rendering. Font rendering refers to the way text is rendered (drawn) on your screen. Due to ideological and personal ideals of how things should work, there is no uniform way to draw fonts across all platforms. So when someone moves from one platform to another they usually suffer some kind of shock when they encounter text.
Now I’m not a genius when it comes to fonts and the ways in which they are rendered. All I know is how they look and a bit I why they are that way.
Let’s start with the way Windows XP and earlier displays their fonts on the default setting.
You might not notice but the text in that image is very jagged. So much so that it hurts my eyes after a while. They’re jagged because each character takes up a certain number of exact pixels. Since we’re not at the stage where pixels are so small we can’t even see them yet, the shape of characters rendered in this form is compromised. On CRT screens this isn’t much of an issue but on LCDs, which have actual pixels, it’s plainly obvious.
Luckily for Windows users, there’s ClearType.
ClearType, as you should be able to see, is much easier on the eyes and isn’t jagged. Thankfully it’s enabled by default on Vista and 7 so you don’t need to turn it on. The idea behind ClearType is readability on the screen itself. It basically works by using the default rendering as a skeleton and smoothing the font out from there. The end result is characters that are still bound by pixels but don’t look nearly as bad.
The Mac way is an entirely different approach.
Apple have decided that the readability of the font is secondary to the look of the font. That might sound shallow but it means that what you see on screen is exactly the way it should look like; on paper and as the designer intended. For some people this looks blurry and they are right, it is slightly blurrier when looked at up close. What makes Quartz text rendering different from ClearType is that Quartz doesn’t bind text to individual pixels. Instead it attempts to keep text in line with uniform spacing between individual characters. The end result is that text is always drawn in the same place relative to other objects using whatever pixels are at hand. Again that doesn’t sound too good but it works better than you might think (and if you have a Mac you might already know).
But what if you want to change the Mac OS X’s font rendering? It’s simple.
Open System Preferences and then click on “Appearance”. Now look at the bottom of the window.
It’s pretty self-explanatory. If you feel the blurriness is too strong then turn the smoothing style down to “Light” or “Standard”. The “Standard” style actually uses a different method to smooth fonts. It’s complicated to explain but it lies somewhere between the default Windows style and “Light” in terms of smoothing. It’s your choice what you do here.
Ultimately you need to get used to some smoothing, Mac OS X is absolutely full of it.
