The Little Things: anti-aliased fonts help Mac OS X shine

i think cleartype isn't activated by default in xp because it's specifically designed to work with lcd displays and the nature of lcd screens' subpixels. since a lot of windoze users have crt displays, cleartype doesn't really look very good on low resolution settings. but recently switching over to mac from pc, cleartype is something i dearly miss. especially readding through this long list of comments. does anybody know of any third party software for osx that'll let you tweak the settings the way you can with cleartype tuner?

and it's not about which one looks "prettier," it's about the one that causes less strain on the eyes. if apple would get this subpixel antialiasing thing down a little better, macs could be better in all areas of fonts.

Don't know what version of Windows XP you are using, but at least, the one that I used in the past, even with ClearType enabled doesn't look as good as Mac OS X.

Mac OS X has the best font smoothing that I've ever seen, by far, followed closely by Linux font smoothing (i.e. Ubuntu Edgy) with Windows lagging well behind.

Of course, this is my personal opinion.

No matter how many times I try,
activating ClearType on my brother's Losedows PC
does nothing to fix the crappy text,
at any size.

If ClearType is so great, why does its developer turn it off by default?

I'm one of the people out here that can't stand anti-aliasing fonts at all. They give me a headache and can actually make me dizzy. I hope that Leopard give us that don't like anti-aliasing a decent font option without it.

Randy at http://www.MacSeven.com

The article in regards to OSX's type is fine, but comparing to XP isn't. They both have the ability, and we can debate whose is better, but thats just silly.

When I got my MacBook Pro (after using three Thinkpads for five years) I could not stand the font-smoothing in OS X, especially the way smaller screen-fonts looked. With the current state of LCD screens I much prefer the way Windows XP lets you toggle between anti-aliasing modes and I actually think that the Windows XP screen shot in this lousy blog-entry looks better than the OS X one does (this may be related to the fact that I am currently viewing TUAW from an XP box as my MacBook Pro is at the shop getting a new LCD screen due to a dead pixel problem). With the current resolutions of LCD screens I much prefere small screen fonts to be unsmoothed. Furthermore the Microsoft fonts Verdana and Tahoma were optimized for on-screen readability even with-out font-smoothing, while Lucida Grande on the Mac is a non-screen font which only works on-screen when anti-aliased. If you turn off anti-aliasing on the mac the fonts look really bad.

I also think that the Windows gamma-settings are superior. Luckily it is easy to enable Windows gamma in the Display settings (under Color) in Mac OS X. When switching back from Windows gamma to Mac gamma the screen looks totally washed out.

The blog About This Particular Macintosh has a really good blog entry about these problems: http://www.atpm.com/12.01/paradigm.shtml

I much prefered the way that non-anti-aliased screen fonts looked in Mac OS 9.

I guess that the Mac OS X font-smoothing looks great on the new 24" iMac, but the resolution on my MacBook Pro is not high enough, so on-screen anti-aliased text looks blurry to me. I must say that I have gotten used to it now and I may also add that Mac OS X font smoothing looks fantastic on large font sizes. It is the small fonts which are problematic.

Apart from the Mac OS X font-smoothing I love my Mac (eventhough I have had the logic board replaced twice, but I must say that Apple was really service-minded about the replacement eventhough it cost them two Intel Core Duo CPUs).

#51, you are not going to see _exactly_ what the user is going to see by turning off antialiasing. Actually then you are seeing what almost no users ever see. Want to see how it looks without antialiasing (other words on windows) you should use Windows. Emulation and virtualisation solutions are there or you could have a windows box for testing the sites. (I presume there is a web service for that too, but I dont' remember it's name

To be honest, I dont really mind what the on screen fonts look like, what I care about is how they print! When I used my printer on a PC the printing was not nearly as nice and crisp as when I used OSX - using the latest drivers on both systems, postscript and truetype fonts, same paper, same test pdf and indesign documens. Macos is certainly better for printing, and I find the fonts a little blurry on macos, however, they are better than windows to my eyes, even with cleartype on. However, what one needs to take into account really is the type of LCD display you are on. In parallels with cleartype on, windows does not outperform osx on the mac displays to my eyes - maybe i need glasses

Let's not forget that ClearType only work on LCD monitor, not CRT. It use the LCD 3 colors dot to create the anti-aliasing, so it is basically a hack of the OS agains the display used.