> One Exemple is this myth, that OSX' font rendering is always better thant the rendering of windows' rendering because OSX applies more anti-aliasing to the fonts. As soon as you get to a certain font size - usually the one you use for articles - anti-aliased fonts are a pain-in-the-eyes.
It's not quite that simple, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with that assertion. It's more to do with the fact that the font rendering is done differently (regarding whether the "pixel grid" is respected) rather than more anti-aliasing is applied.
> Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).
Apple paid for their professional fonts too, even including Zapfino — simply to show off their font rendering. It's not cheaper, and they already invest a lot in to their rendering engine, which has improved in leaps and bounds over different versions of Mac OS X. Fonts that looks good on Mac OS X can come out terrible on Windows because manual hinting to every typeface has to be applied to make them look good, or Cleartype will come along and distort all the character forms.
The only reason you think Apple's font rendering is cheap is because you're not used to it — and it pervades everything you read. In contrast, to me Windows fonts look "cheaper", in that they're all thin and sickly. However, it should be understood that's it's a subjective choice, rather than one necessarily being better than another.
It's not quite that simple, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with that assertion. It's more to do with the fact that the font rendering is done differently (regarding whether the "pixel grid" is respected) rather than more anti-aliasing is applied.
> Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).
Apple paid for their professional fonts too, even including Zapfino — simply to show off their font rendering. It's not cheaper, and they already invest a lot in to their rendering engine, which has improved in leaps and bounds over different versions of Mac OS X. Fonts that looks good on Mac OS X can come out terrible on Windows because manual hinting to every typeface has to be applied to make them look good, or Cleartype will come along and distort all the character forms.
The only reason you think Apple's font rendering is cheap is because you're not used to it — and it pervades everything you read. In contrast, to me Windows fonts look "cheaper", in that they're all thin and sickly. However, it should be understood that's it's a subjective choice, rather than one necessarily being better than another.
http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi... and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... might be interesting reading.