Will Windows ever implement Mac-like font smoothing?

One thing that I love about the Mac's retina display is how amazing text looks (due to the font smoothing). Windows has never had font smoothing like this (see how Japanese text looks on Chrome to see the bad side of it), but with the increase in high-resolution displays (such as Toshiba's Kirabooks and other up-and-coming ultra-high-res Windows 8 machines), I wonder if Windows will ever decide to implement that kind of font smoothing. Is that something other Windows users would like to see as well? Do you think it'll ever happen?

 

Isn't ClearType text antialiasing standard on all Windows operating systems? I personally have no problem with Windows font rendering. Even with ClearType turned off my 15" 1080p display is high-DPI enough that the jaggies don't bother me. If anything, I actually find the increased sharpness to be easier on the eyes, as it does away with the slight blurriness inherent in subpixel rendering.

I think text looks amazing on the Retina display not because of any font smoothing but because of the extremely high pixel density. The benefits of subpixel rendering are most apparent on low-res displays anyway and the whole reason it was implemented in the first place was to make text look sharper on such displays. If you already have a 220 DPI rMBP whose individual pixels you can't discern at all there's not as much benefit to having font smoothing.

That's the reason I find text much clearer on my Retina iPad (which has no font smoothing BTW, unlike OS X on the rMPB's) than on the Surface RT, which uses ClearType to compensate for the lack of pixels. Microsoft claims it's better than having a high-DPI display with no subpixel rendering but that's bull.

However, if you're referring to why certain fonts seem to look different or better on Macs vs. Windows, that's due to their different algorithms and approaches to font smoothing. Apple's philosophy is to preserve the design of the original typeface as much as possible, at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Microsoft's philosophy is to make the text as sharp as possible, even at the expense of not remaining true to the typeface. The difference stems from Apple's history in desktop publishing and graphic design as well as differences in design philosophy between Gates and Jobs. Since you're a Mac user you're probably used that kind of font rendering and think the Windows approach looks inferior, while Windows users will see the Apple approach and say the same thing. Of course Apple fanboys will then quote Jobs saying "Microsoft has no taste," yadda yadda yadda, and then everyone starts arguing over something as trifling as this. At the end of the day, I wouldn't say one approach is better than the other. It's down to your own aesthetic preferences and what you're used to. And honestly I don't notice it enough to care anyway.

Note you can also get the Apple font smoothing on Windows by using Safari, which is a good solution.

 

Well, the way fonts appear on Windows is one of the reasons I prefer to use Macs (since I study languages and everything I do involves text and typing, including using foreign characters and scripts). I still use Windows computers, so I'm familiar with the way the fonts are rendered.

Maybe you know more about this than I do, but this picture illustrates what I think I'm referring to (i.e. the difference between Windows and Mac font-smoothing):



The Mac font is on the bottom; it's slightly bigger, but that's beside the point. While shades of gray are used to smooth the text on the Mac, various colors are used in Windows. I don't fully know the ramifications of that, other than that the two two do appear different when zoomed out (and maybe I notice the difference more because of the reasons I stated above).

Either way, this wasn't intended as a Mac vs. Windows contest; I like them both for different reasons. But you answered my question in that Windows is not likely to adopt that "gray" style of rendering if it goes against Microsoft's philosophy on fonts.

 

Apple has the advantage of developing the hardware *and* the OS. So fonts designed by Apple look good on Retina, of course.

Beautiful fonts on Retina displays is not a universal thing, and wasn't always so. One only needs to look at apps that are not designed for Retina, like old versions of Office, to see what happens when not-Retina fonts are displayed on Retina. It's kinda painful.

Windows doesn't do super high res fonts because there aren't many super high res PC monitors, so the need simply isn't there. When we start seeing 4K stuff we are going to see new fonts to take advantage of it.

For Windows on a Retina Mac, I'm sure MS would *happily* allow Apple to design fonts for it. It's their screen, after all. 8)

 

Hmm, well, is it really a matter of "non-retina fonts"? Because on a Retina Mac, every font on every website that I've seen looks good. It's only when an an application hasn't been retina-fied that it doesn't look good, but the actual fonts don't seem to matter. Like, Arial isn't a font designed by Apple. But even it looked good on the Retina Mac before Microsoft made retina-versions of their Office software.

 

Huh, Apple designs fonts? Never heard of Apple as a foundry, always thought they licensed fonts by various type designers, just like Microsoft...

As for the Cleartype thing, remember to configure it to suit your needs. If you like Mac-like grayscale subpixel smoothing, Cleartype will gladly comply. Also remember how different font outlines (PostScript vs. TrueType, to keep it simple) are treated differently by font rasterizers - and how some fonts or font variants are even specifically fine-tuned for on-screen rendition. You really don't want to compare Apple and Oranges (pardon the pun).

 

It was perhaps overly general. The ecosystem needs to be there to support super high res, fonts or the app or whatever, or they won't display properly.

Web fonts and retina displays | WebINK BlogWebINK Blog

Why should you become retina ready? | Webdesigner Depot

A Quick-fix to: Blurry Text on MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Retina is a thing developers, at least to some extent, need to actually program against. It's not like every app (and font) just suddenly looked better on Retina.

 

Thanks for that first link; that explains it well. Makes sense why any wacky ttf font I downloaded from a free font site looks good on the retina display.

 

I notice a dramatic difference in how smooth text is between IE10 and Chrome. Particularly on my 1680x1050 work machine, text on certain sites (ArsTechnica and TheVerge in particular) is very jagged in Chrome but not in IE10. I think IE10 has some sort of font smoothing, though I don't understand the specifics of it.

 

I think you're right; I've noticed that as well. IE has some additional smoothing that Windows doesn't have in other places (including other browsers).

 

I for one hope not. Like octiceps, I find the sharper fonts that you get without smoothing to be easier to look at than the often-jagged ones that font smoothing gives. That's one of the reasons I don't have a Mac; the fonts on them annoy me. That isn't so much the case on iPods or Retina displays, but I credit the higher DPI for making it OK to look at. It does depend on the particular monitor, too - I've noticed that my tolerance for ClearType can vary significantly with the monitor (and somewhat with its configuration).

I think you're right. I did some comparisons of how different browsers render the above sentence. My system is running Windows XP with the "Standard" font smoothing enabled (not Clear Type, nor the none at all option):

Edit: For some reason NBR is shrinking the attachment in this post. If you view just the image, it will display in the proper size.



As you can see, IE is quite different. This is with the default "Always use ClearType" option turned on. If I turn it off, it displays the same as Chrome and Safari for Windows. I believe that is the "Standard" font smoothing on XP. Personally, I find the Chrome/Safari/IE8 without ClearType option much more pleasing to look at than the IE8 with ClearType (default) option. Given the lack of any shading, my guess is Opera and Firefox aren't using any font smoothing. Given that 99% of my browsing is with Opera or Firefox, I'm perfectly okay with that. It's nice and sharp - although IMO the Chrome/Safari rendering looks pretty good, too. Only IE's default rendering looks bad to me.

Safari for Windows used to have absolutely awful font smoothing back around version 3. The blurriness was out of control, and it was noticeably worse than Safari on OSX (although I found iMacs from that time to be excessively blurry as well - but not nearly as bad as Safari for Windows). They did fix that by Safari 4 for Windows, and by the current 5 it's actually decent.

 

For some reason, the default ClearType rendering in Windows XP has always looked awful to me. When zoomed in it looks exactly like the IE 8 text in the image above. Back in my XP days, I was using 17'' and 19'' LCD's with 1280x1024, so the dot pitch wasn't great, and I could actually see that orangish hue around the edges, which made everything blurry as hell. That's why I always stuck with "Standard" font smoothing, which had more jaggies but looked way sharper and was better than no font smoothing at all. I skipped Vista altogether so I can't comment on that, but when I started using 7 I noticed that ClearType looked much better out of the box. Plus, the ClearType Tuner was included, while you had to install it separately on XP. Windows 8 looks exactly like Windows 7 in terms of font smoothing. Now that I have a 15.6'' 1080p laptop, which is easily the highest PPI display I have owned short of my phone and tablet, pixel density is high enough that I could disable any font smoothing and still have very smooth looking text. ClearType is still on because I haven't bothered to mess with it. In fact, I sometimes have a hard time reading this forum because text is too small, due to me using 100% DPI scaling in Windows. DPI on my laptop is better than on an iPad 2, and that never bothered me even when using it much closer to my eyes compared to my laptop.