MacType works nice on the surface, but using it feels like a bit of a minefield, because if it interacts incorrectly with one of your programs, it can be an annoyance, and because you've gotten used to the font rendering, you might not immediately realize. When playing Riot's VALORANT, it caused massive lag spikes - and that was before I started worrying about the anticheat.
MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
11–20 of 130 posts
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#12I connect my Windows 10 thinkpad and my M1 macbook to the same old 1080p external screens, and I prefer the Windows 10 text rendering. The MacOS text rendering looks a bit bolder and a bit more blurry. On the laptops screen, the high pixel density hides the difference.
Yup. Apple fonts look good because they make them all nice and chonky which avoids all the technically correct hinting that preserves actual font shape but doesn’t look as nice in the end that Windows does.
I have a metric compatible clone of the SF Mono font installed on Windows. To get it to look the same as it does on macOS, I have to use the Medium weight to account for this.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#13I'm glad this is still being developed. I tried it out around the time Windows 8/10 came out, because to my taste the Cleartype settings were much worse than in Windows 7. However, MacType didn't help with Metro programs, or with Word 2013, in which Microsoft switched to a non-subpixel renderer for the document and made everything a jagged mess. What were they thinking?
As another commenter said, moving toward higher DPI makes this less necessary. But I'm still bitter over the years of ugliness I had to suffer through after having such nice Cleartype rendering in Windows XP and 7.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#14I connect my Windows 10 thinkpad and my M1 macbook to the same old 1080p external screens, and I prefer the Windows 10 text rendering. The MacOS text rendering looks a bit bolder and a bit more blurry. On the laptops screen, the high pixel density hides the difference.
Agreed, on low-res screens, I actually prefer completely unaliased text rendering. It looks jagged and I like the kind of retro vibe it gives.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#15It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes…
I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing.
Prior to very high pixel density screens, I hated the Mac/android font rendering, mostly due to the migraines caused by my eyes straining to correct for the seemly out-of-focus text blur.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#16I just switched from Windows to a Mac, and I immediately found that the colors and contrast and the clarity of images and text on the same monitor I connect my laptop too improved. I wasn't sure if it was just in my head, but something about the rendering in Mac seems better to me. I don't know if they have better calibration for colors and contrast, better anti-aliasing, etc., but I seem to see the screen much bette…
Have you tried to use the windows ClearType Text Tuner to improve the font rendering? Windows tries to take advantage of subpixels to improve crispness but it can cause color fringing which makes text harder to read. The tuner utility helps with that. You can also disable cleartype entirely to get standard anti-aliasing, which is what macOS does on non-retina screens. Personally I find the macOS way of rendering on standard dpi displays a bit too blurry.
As for images, the only difference I can imagine is a different handling of color profiles.
Update: I totally forgot about the mixed dpi situation. When you hook up a monitor of a different dpi than the laptop (e.g. the laptop is 150% scaling but the monitor is 100%, or vice versa), then only one display will be perfectly crisp for all apps, and that's the primary display at login. Only applications designed to take advantage of the right scaling API's will look crisp on both displays in that case. The other ones will look blurry on the non-primary display. MacOS does tend to handle that situation a little bit better.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#17MacType works nice on the surface, but using it feels like a bit of a minefield, because if it interacts incorrectly with one of your programs, it can be an annoyance, and because you've gotten used to the font rendering, you might not immediately realize. When playing Riot's VALORANT, it caused massive lag spikes - and that was before I started worrying about the anticheat.
Indeed. It seems to inject code into every process on the system. That increases the risk to the system more than any typical standalone program.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#18It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes…
It's wild to me that on both Windows and OSX that something that is obviously just personal preference is baked into the operating system, with no method for changing it. It's on the same level as having an operating system that didn't let you change your desktop background.
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#19It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes…
I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing. Prior to very high pixel density screens, I hated the Mac/android font rendering, mostly due to the migraines caused by my eyes straining to correct for the seemly out-of-focus text blur.
[deleted]
Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
#20It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes…
It's wild to me that on both Windows and OSX that something that is obviously just personal preference is baked into the operating system, with no method for changing it. It's on the same level as having an operating system that didn't let you change your desktop background.
At the same time, everything could be reconfigured at will, but if you can't provider a consistent UX, that wouldn't help a whole lot with sales and customer binding.
How much you can, or can't modify as an end-user probably relates to the HIG and general usability and transferability as well.
In some ways, there have been cases where you cannot change the background of things, or at least not in an obvious way. I suppose it really depends on the specific user and their user-case to have that matter (or not matter at all).