The Apple philosophy of showing screen fonts in a way consistent with printing is opposite of the Windows way of displaying screen fonts for readability.
This issue has been discussed at length in the past, but because of the recent surge in popularity of Apple laptops and desktops, I wonder if this issue will resurface as more ex-Windows users switch to the Mac and find out that the fonts might look very different to them.
I am a "dual mode" user. I have a XP machine I have to use at work, and at home I have a Mac. Since I was a Windows users for a long time before I started using the Mac, my brain is "wired" to think that the Windows way of showing the fonts looks best.
My XP machine is a Thinkpad X60. The Thinkpads have always had really great laptop displays that are really clear and easy to read. Because of this, I run Windows with no font smoothing. To me it looks "pixel perfect" and I can stare at the screen all day with absolutely no eye strain.
When I first got my Mac, I would get headaches all the time after a short period of use. To me the Mac fonts looked "fuzzy". I turned the smoothing to "Light" and set the font size threshold to 12, but the whole way the larger fonts where displayed gave me eye burn-out after a very short period of time.
I discovered a program called "Silk" that allows you to globally turn off smoothing in OSX 10.4.x. For the smaller size fonts that make up the bulk of text in documents and web pages, the fonts now look like "Windows" fonts in that there is no smoothing. This completely changed my ability to use the Mac. Now I can work with it all day with no headaches.
I know in Windows XP you can also control the font smoothing, but for me, I've always preferred "minimal" to none. That is what I define as "clear".
When I poll my other friends and family I get a split verdict on how the Mac fonts look versus Windows. When I switched my wife to a Mac from XP, she had no problem. I set the smoothing to "Light" in OSX, and to her everything looks fine. She of course was only a casual computer user and only used her XP machine for light activities.
My daughter on the other hand thinks the default Mac way looks "fuzzy" compared to her old XP laptop (which I had the smoothing tuned to the way I like it). So her brain got wired like mine. Fortunately using Silk I could turn down the smoothing on her Mac laptop, and now she is fine with it.
My other Windows friends are split. Some think the Apple way is "fuzzy", some think it is fine. It is about 50/50.
On a larger scale, I was wondering how many Windows users converting to Apple will have the same issue as I do. I don't have Leopard installed yet, so I don't know what font controls are available in the latest version of OSX. I would be looking for "no smoothing" or "extremely light", but I doubt if that will be there since that breaks the existing Apple philosophy of how the fonts are supposed to be rendered.
I watched a recording of Steve Jobs giving a commencement speech and he talked about how in his student days he took calligraphy and that had a huge impact on the design of the initial Macs. The whole Apple philosophy of screen rendering fonts in a way consistent with how they will be printed is surely rooted in that experience.
Anyway, just to provide a visual. Here is a screen capture of a part of the Yahoo home page showing how it looks on my Windows XP Thinkpad with no smoothing, and my wife's iMac with the font setting at "Light". The top portion is from my laptop, the bottom the Mac.
To me, the top is "clear" and the bottom is "blurry". I know people that have Mac "wired" brains say that the top part looks "jaggy". To me it is pretty interesting how different people define "normal".
This issue has been discussed at length in the past, but because of the recent surge in popularity of Apple laptops and desktops, I wonder if this issue will resurface as more ex-Windows users switch to the Mac and find out that the fonts might look very different to them.
I am a "dual mode" user. I have a XP machine I have to use at work, and at home I have a Mac. Since I was a Windows users for a long time before I started using the Mac, my brain is "wired" to think that the Windows way of showing the fonts looks best.
My XP machine is a Thinkpad X60. The Thinkpads have always had really great laptop displays that are really clear and easy to read. Because of this, I run Windows with no font smoothing. To me it looks "pixel perfect" and I can stare at the screen all day with absolutely no eye strain.
When I first got my Mac, I would get headaches all the time after a short period of use. To me the Mac fonts looked "fuzzy". I turned the smoothing to "Light" and set the font size threshold to 12, but the whole way the larger fonts where displayed gave me eye burn-out after a very short period of time.
I discovered a program called "Silk" that allows you to globally turn off smoothing in OSX 10.4.x. For the smaller size fonts that make up the bulk of text in documents and web pages, the fonts now look like "Windows" fonts in that there is no smoothing. This completely changed my ability to use the Mac. Now I can work with it all day with no headaches.
I know in Windows XP you can also control the font smoothing, but for me, I've always preferred "minimal" to none. That is what I define as "clear".
When I poll my other friends and family I get a split verdict on how the Mac fonts look versus Windows. When I switched my wife to a Mac from XP, she had no problem. I set the smoothing to "Light" in OSX, and to her everything looks fine. She of course was only a casual computer user and only used her XP machine for light activities.
My daughter on the other hand thinks the default Mac way looks "fuzzy" compared to her old XP laptop (which I had the smoothing tuned to the way I like it). So her brain got wired like mine. Fortunately using Silk I could turn down the smoothing on her Mac laptop, and now she is fine with it.
My other Windows friends are split. Some think the Apple way is "fuzzy", some think it is fine. It is about 50/50.
On a larger scale, I was wondering how many Windows users converting to Apple will have the same issue as I do. I don't have Leopard installed yet, so I don't know what font controls are available in the latest version of OSX. I would be looking for "no smoothing" or "extremely light", but I doubt if that will be there since that breaks the existing Apple philosophy of how the fonts are supposed to be rendered.
I watched a recording of Steve Jobs giving a commencement speech and he talked about how in his student days he took calligraphy and that had a huge impact on the design of the initial Macs. The whole Apple philosophy of screen rendering fonts in a way consistent with how they will be printed is surely rooted in that experience.
Anyway, just to provide a visual. Here is a screen capture of a part of the Yahoo home page showing how it looks on my Windows XP Thinkpad with no smoothing, and my wife's iMac with the font setting at "Light". The top portion is from my laptop, the bottom the Mac.
To me, the top is "clear" and the bottom is "blurry". I know people that have Mac "wired" brains say that the top part looks "jaggy". To me it is pretty interesting how different people define "normal".
Comments
P.S. Do you still have any Jaiku invites left? I'm dying to have it! chris.martinez at mac dot com
Thanks!
It's a fact that the fonts are blurry on the Mac.
The question to Apple is....what is the number of people printing and reading on their Macs.
If printing was a priority for Apple, it could have been implemented for a specific application interface and NOT globally.
i hope they do something better to control smoothing with Snow Leopard
The truth is Windows Clear Type smoothing blows Mac blows macs shockingly ugly font smoothing out of the water.
I spent hours my first day on the Mac trying to find out why my new Mac could not set up my display corectly. I thought its display settings could not detect my monitor correctly so I searched the internet and found that is just the way mac does it. Nothing on the screen looks clear at all but photos.
It's not even about readability vs pretties as you infer. There's plenty of data from people like Microsoft's Bill Hill to support the notion that antialiased fonts are more pleasing for most people, but not much information to say whether the rendering of individual letters or the overall word-form (the shape of a given word) are more important. It's possible that Apple's top people think word-forms are more important than letter-forms when it comes to readability.
As for me, I started out using computers before there even was a "Windows", and I can comfortably say that after years of using CRT monitors with crappy bitmap fonts, I'm happy to embrace the new world of "fuzzy" fonts in whatever device I'm using.