Over 90% of computers render fonts terribly
Which do you prefer? Be honest now. OK, so maybe it’s not fair to compare the rendering of a font on a computer screen with a scan of actual printed type. And maybe it’s wrong to pick on Windows without offering up an example of how text is rendered in Mac OS X or Linux. Surely all computers have huge limitations when rendering the printed word. But actually I’m being more unfair than that. Please take another look at those examples, compare them, then click here to reveal the real captions for the above images to find out where they actually originated. (If you prefer the deceptive captions, you can reload ‘em).
To my eyes, OS X’s type rendering looks much like a scan of a newspaper or book. The weighting of characters is nice and even, and the text is pleasing to the eye and easy to read. Even if you didn’t buy the pretense of the original caption, it’s at least slightly possible to pass the OS X rendering off as something that was actually typeset and printed at high resolution.
Windows XP’s font rendering is an indefensible monstrosity.2 It pains me to think that over 90% of the personal computers in the world, in the year 2008, display text in this manner3. The characters in the Windows sample have very uneven weighting, with all corners and pointy details stabbing my eye with a couple pixels of absolute blackness while curves are rendered an anemic gray and straight lines are often reduced down to a single pixel in width (This problem jumps out at me in almost every letter, but can be seen more clearly in the sharp “J” next to the soft “o” in Jonathan, in the oddly sharp lower left corner of the lower-case “a”, and in the weird unevenness of the italics and the numerals). The best that can be said for the kerning is that it is bizarre; Letters are either smashed too close together or separated by chasms, within a single word. Italics are so awful in so many ways that I’m thinking of redesigning my pages to avoid using them altogether –Windows users have to suffer enough with regular text. Some characters look strangely condensed.
A few details to note: compare Windows’s rendering of the word “sweeping” to its rendering of the word “events” (why so much space between the instances of “e” and “v”?), then compare Windows’s renderings of the word “events”, “Rhys”, “1930’s”, “Children” to the OS X versions. And why are the OS X and Windows renderings of these lines so different in their relative lengths?
I’m sure there are compelling-sounding engineering reasons behind Microsoft’s assault on typography-loving eyes everywhere, but the proof is in the pudding. Both of these samples are of the same font, Georgia (designed specifically for Microsoft), and it is either Alanis-ironic or just plain sad that OS X kicks Windows’s ass so soundly at rendering Microsoft’s own. Another few hours of flipping between platforms and I’ll be compelled to file a shareholder resolution to push Microsoft to fix their font render engine, undergo a few sessions of maoist self-criticism, and make a public apology.
Windows, heal thyself, particularly thy crap-ass rendering of typography
- If only there were a recognized acronym for “rolling on the floor hemorrhaging out my eyeballs” [↩]
- And I’m being charitable. If you are even entertaining for a moment the idea of defending the crappy font engine built into Windows XP, please first revisit the sample images above and start building up your reserves of purest denial. [↩]
- actually, it’s worse than that, since most Windows users don’t know to enable cleartype [↩]
