Will Snow Leopard fix blurry fonts?

[Ping Guo]

I may be in the minority here, but I find OSX font rendering problematic and inferior to Windows Cleartype. Not unusably bad, but I do a lot of work online, reading reports, doing emails and spreadsheets, reading Macrumors in my free time. After a long work day I feel a lot of eye fatigue with OSX, sometimes to the point of a migraine coming on. Not so with windows.

Searching for more information, I came across these:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000884.html

http://www.atpm.com/12.01/paradigm.shtml


Now at least I know I'm not crazy! I've read before that OSX screen drivers are worse than Windows, and to me Windows has more pop and visual clarity. Not a big deal, but the poor sub-pixel rendering (a term I picked up researching this) actually is a big deal. I don't want to finish off every day with eyestrain and a pounding headache.

For those who are developing for Snow Leopard, will Apple address this problem? While this may not seem like a game-changing feature or innovation, it has a huge effect on the daily usability of any OS.

 

[hellomoto4]

After just switching to Mac, after many years of putting up with windows, I have noticed the same thing as you have. Some fonts aren't too bad, but some are just plain annoying!

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

I can't remember what I did back with Tiger - but there was a command that I entered into terminal that made all the fonts look crystal clear. (similar to Windows font appearance)

If I find it again, I'll post it here.

Another avenue to consider - is your LCD itself. Hopefully you're running @ native resolution (usually the maximum resolution the LCD supports).

Also play with the contrast / color gamut / phase / gamma / pixel clock - as this can have a huge effect on the appearance of fonts.

 

[kolax]

Windows doesn't anti-aliasing fonts where as OS X does. Fonts in OS X appear much smoother, where as Windows appears much sharper.

Some people like OS X, some people like Windows's font rendering. You'll get used to it, and once you are used to it, you'll prefer it.

 

[Geek 2.0]

I don't know about everyone else, but I really like the OS X font rendering. Yes, maybe it isn't as defined, but I think it looks pretty smooth. But I have noticed the difference.

 

[Ludde]

Windows font rendering really make my eyes bleed. It's way too sharp, out of shape and ugly. Reading in OS X is a fresh breeze in comparison, at least for me.

 

[Sun Baked]

System Preferences > Appearance > Font Smoothing

Play around with the settings, and you can also move the turn off value for fonts x big to 10 or 12 also.