Comments on: Safari Web Browser on Windows and Font Rendering.

By: bing crosby

bing crosby — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:36:54 +0000

iphone 4…………future here today.

fix your fonts MS

By: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:11:20 +0000

the iPhone 4, with its 300+ ppi display is making fonts on MS Windows, including Windows 7, look like 1994 dot-matrix.

MS better catch up with its font rendering, soon we will have 200-300 ppi displays for the desktop, if people keep using desktops that is…………

MS—providing type solutions for 20th century problems………10 years into the 21st century!

By: FG

FG — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:51:46 +0000

Funny, I was actually thinking about this today. I actually find it impossible to work with Microsoft’s ClearType for extended periods of time, and switch it off when I have to work on a Windows PC. The edges on ClearType-rendered fonts are very jagged, and don’t have enough fidelity to the original design. Mac OS X rendering is superior, and when I look at Mac-rendered text, it feels more like a book or a magazine. With Windows, it has a very strong ‘You’re looking at a computer that can’t render text well’ feeling. Funnily enough, Windows’ type rendering was one of the reasons why I sold my PC earlier this year to replace it with a Mac. (I’d had a Mac before that PC, but I bought the PC in a pinch. I regretted it about a week in.)

By: RNKLN

RNKLN — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:02:19 +0000

How come, that while i’m in the office (using Windows XP) and i want to read a longer text, i always make a print, while at home on my Mac, i can keep reading from the screen for hours?

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:16:12 +0000

Ok, back to your Windows-world, then…

Me, I prefer actual letterforms.

have you seen fonts on an iPhone, which is over 160 ppi? Looks incredible, and this is the future, displays with very high ppi (pixels per inch)

Seen fonts on Apple’s iPad? Incredible, windows world has no equilevent.

But to each their own, you most likely grew up with microsoft machines…

By: Squeak

Squeak — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:35:26 +0000

The blurry fonts makes me want to rub my eyes.
I’d realy hate to have to read something like say, this blog, using that technique.
Smoothing is a technique that only works with very high resolutions, and thus large fonts sizes, because otherwise it will have too much artifacts. (or for people with poor vision.)

By: Alice

Alice — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:57:47 +0000

Great article. One of the best blogs I have read on the subject.

By: dougit

dougit — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:13:15 +0000

Hi Harm & Studio!

Both of you are (literally) looking at this the wrong way. Go back and re-read What “Turkish” wrote about word-forms versus clarity of specific letter-forms. Again, if you are reading text, like an email, a website, a book, an article, etc., one tends to look at the entire word-form, skipping over individual letters unless the word in question is one the reader does not recognize. So, if you have a small vocabulary, or you are reading a foreign language then one might need to look at every individual letter in the word. Or, if one is using the OS for computer programming, or some other activity where reading each and every letter, number, and all the other odd characters on a keyboard that might make up, for example, a programming language, then you might have an argument.

By: studio

studio — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:58:00 +0000

Hello, I am a mac user, so I’m looking on this blurry s..t for last 6 years… I understand that mac is better for typography.. bla bla bla… but in user interface {and in e-mail and Safari…} doesn’t matter the typography and in the document window of design application it can be rendered truly “typographically” by the application.
The real stupidity of this thing is that you must use one or another.

By: harm

harm — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:52:27 +0000

Look at the screenshot ‘50 Stunning…’.
I find it ridiculous how the right vertical line in the u of ‘tutorial’ is not as black as compared to the left vertical. This is an artifact of mimicking how these characters would be positioned in print, but for *screen reading*, it sucks big time. Same for the h, n and u in ‘techniques’ on the line below it: to me it looks like the monitor has some phase alignment problems or there’s a spot my glasses: same blurry effect.

I own a ‘09 Mac, love the software, but hate the font rendering – not for brochure design, but for reading texts 8 hours per day or more.

~harm

By: Xman

Xman — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:29:54 +0000

very informative article.

I will try Safari with my new Windows 7 install.