This debate is pointless because people almost always give the nod to what they're personally most accustomed to, perhaps also labelling the others as garbage for good measure.

> Windows' font rendering (I can only speak for up to Windows 7) is still quite nasty, especially at larger font sizes. The lack of vertical antialiasing ruins it for these cases.

Weird, I would consider that Windows has the best font rendering. Do you have any example photos you'd like to show?

A comment below [1] has some pictures, do you really find Windows's rendering to be bad?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644228

I remember reading that people get very used/comfortable to Mac vs. Windows style of font rendering, and tend to perceive the other as inferior.

Yes, this classic flame war. There used to be a Windows vs OSX font rendering flame war every week on HN, in the good old days.

OSX uses antialiasing, which means the fonts have a nice shape, but they are fuzzy, blurry, and to some users headache-inducing.

Windows reshapes the fonts so they fit perfectly in the pixel grid, but the shape is not what will be printed, and it looks ugly to some users.

Because people like what they are used to, and because Apple vs Microsoft is already a flame war, no-one can really agree.

I used to like Windows' font rendering (when they introduced ClearType), but after having to Mac OS X about five years ago and using an iPhone and iPad for a couple of years I'm so used to Apple's font rendering that Windows looks really ugly to me... Quite subjective though.

Perhaps it's partially due to the fact that Mac laptops and iDevices have higher quality displays than typical Windows machines?

Higher quality... in what way? Resolution, or something else?

Yes, but many are also based on IPS technology instead of TN, which supports a much wider colour gamut.

The article is about an upgrade to the Freetype library, more specifically to the CFF rasterizer. It has nothing to do with TrueType fonts (most of them, probably).

I've been using Arch Linux as my only OS for more than 5 years, and the only certain applications have given me font-related trouble. Firefox somehow doesn't select the correct alternative (even though fontconfig works fine).

Ubuntu's patches for the various font rendering technologies are my #1 must-have software on Linux. Any distro I use is either a Ubuntu or something that has these patches an easy install away. (Arch has them in the AUR, for example)

This has, honestly, been a blind spot of mine and something that has kept me in Ubuntu rather than Arch or Debian. Can you elaborate on what the patches are called and how to replicate Ubuntu's rendering in Arch? Thanks so much.

Now I really feel clueless for not knowing better to check the Arch Wiki. Thanks.

Although I haven't tried 13.04 yet, Qt apps on Ubuntu weren't that great on font rendering. There's room for improvement there.

Also, take into account that Linux is not Ubuntu. It's a growing trend to identify Linux with Ubuntu, as if other distributions (or even other desktop environments in the same Ubuntu distro) weren't to take into account. Have you seen KDE font rendering? Open a Chromium browser, navigate to some pages, it's awful.

Even among the Ubuntu variants, font rendering is only smooth in GTK-based desktop environments, i.e. GNOME/Unity and XFCE. Last time I checked, fonts looked awful in Kubuntu, especially if you opened either Firefox or LibreOffice. Lubuntu likewise looks like it received none of the font rendering improvements that Ubuntu has had by default for ages.

Of course, "awful" is subjective so you might prefer the way KDE and LXDE render fonts. But it doesn't change the fact that they're different.

You can make the fonts looks equally good in Kubuntu by doing this - http://askubuntu.com/questions/130758/how-to-configure-kubun... and changing the Desktop Effect -> Scaling Method to Crisp.

Does it also affect Firefox and LibreOffice?

Yes, just make sure to use the gtk-oxygen theme with the right font for GTK+ apps.

>Also, take into account that Linux is not Ubuntu.

And that FreeType is not Linux only.

What kind of font rendering does Ubuntu uses? I'm on Arch and freetype-infinality rendering is incredibe eye candy.

Agreed. I made this in the past:

http://i.imgur.com/4dGbR.png (Ubuntu)

http://i.imgur.com/mfyjw.png (OS X)

http://i.imgur.com/BqOdg.png (Windows 7)

Interesting: in terms of visual quality, I would rank those in order of decreasing preference as OS X, Windows 7, Ubuntu.

Is Windows even using the same font? I think Windows prioritizes making the text look sharp over getting all the character strokes in the right place. OS X and Ubuntu look very similar except for the line spacing, and the lowercase ‘a’, which looks kind of strange/vertically compressed on Ubuntu.

>I think Windows prioritizes making the text look sharp over getting all the character strokes in the right place.

Yup, pretty much. A trio of Spolsky/Atwood posts from 2007 worth reading:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/whats-wrong-with-ap...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

They should all be using Verdana, as per HN's CSS. I have the font installed in each OS so it should be a fair fight unless I screwed something different up.

The font in the Ubuntu image is not Verdana.

Ubuntu does not install Microsoft fonts by default. It will fallback to Ubuntu's default font.

I always have msttcorefonts installed which includes Verdana. It's part of the script that is the first thing I run on a new install...

(Like, a half hour ago, I checked that Verdana was installed and then recreated the screenshot from the original post and it's identical as far as I can tell.

The fonts are similar, but you can see the numeral "3" is different. They're not the same font.

Right-click the text and choose "Inspect element". In the right-hand column, make sure "Computed" is selected at the top, then look to see what font-family is being rendered. (If you click "Rules" at the top, you can see which rules are active.)

In my experience, this doesn't necessarily give the correct font. Some distros have font aliases in fontconfig. I've found that `fc-match` can easily find the true font being used for a given font name/pattern, e.g. fc-match monospace might give DejaVu Mono

Yeah, it says Verdana: http://i.imgur.com/50Sx6c3.png

The '3' doesn't look any more different than other chars due to rendering difference, to me.

And KDE's font manager's take on Verdana: http://i.imgur.com/4c5cSe3.png

And Firefox on my system, just as a reference: http://i.imgur.com/a2yZ7UQ.png

Thanks for double-checking. The 'a' looks very different on the Windows 7 sample!

Your right, my mistake. I verified with my ubuntu install. My Verdana looks the same as yours.

There are differences with how the text is rendered. Maybe it has to do with kerning and subpixel optimizations.

I find Windows 7 the most appealing (and sharpest).

The others are just way too blurry.

Windows has distorted the font here hasn't it? If you're rating fonts on sharpness, Windows would win here, but by any other criteria (distortion, kerning, adequate aliasing, legibility), it fails. The Windows rendering almost looks like a monospaced font. You're throwing a lot out in order to get things sharper at small sizes, and for many people, that matters far more than perceived sharpness.

> legibility

Seriously? I could agree that it may not fully represent the intended font, but the entire point is that it's more legible when it sacrifices that, and I find it hard to believe that you find Windows's text to be less legible than Mac's/Ubuntu's.

i.e. I think Windows sacrifices the fontmaker's intent in order to please the reader, who couldn't care less about the fontmaker's intentions rather than the actual output (unless the reader is the fontmaker himself).

Do you really think it's failing in that too?

Kerning, character spacing and character shape are all designed to help legibility, and I think frankly that the Windows approach is a naive attempt to optimise one aspect of legibility at the expense of all others. So yes, I'm afraid I do disagree that it is more legible, I think it sacrifices too much, as these screenshots make clear the font is deformed so much it looks like a different font, spacing is all off, and glyphs are uneven.

This is somewhat subjective, and you might have a different opinion, but there is more than one variable in play when it comes to legibility, it doesn't just come down to how sharp the text is.

I know, I didn't mean to imply sharpness is the only factor. It's just one of several important factors.

But I couldn't care less about the font being deformed, as long as it looked better than it used to. The fact that you seem to care so much about the deformation into a different font seems to imply to me that your goal is to preserve the original font, rather than to make it look nice on the screen.

If you have the time, would you mind taking the pictures in the comment below and making a smaller bitmap that shows exactly which character(s) you think are not kerned well, and which Linux or Mac kerns better? I'm really curious what I'm not seeing.

Kerning: Look at the a in was, or the e in difference, or OS X - all of these have too much space and the difference is obvious. Distortion: IMHO Fonts carry meaning and affect legibility, they are not just there to make text look nice on screen. Deforming a font subtracts meaning, and in some cases will make it less legible, particular an automated deformation like this.

I agree with you. I don't care what the fonts were designed to look like. I only care about readability. The default font settings on Ubuntu hurt my eyes. Thankfully this is easy to fix by switching to full hinting and enabling subpixel rendering.

For anyone wanting the Linux font rendering on Windows - check out MacType (https://code.google.com/p/mactype/). Works best on high-dpi monitors, and it's a matter of taste on low-dpi (little blurrier, but the fonts are more authentic).