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MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

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Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#111

Post by fleaaaa »

whyoh wrote: post #106
hashhar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio management better on MacOS? There is no system level volume mixer, you can't route audio between apps, you can't even monitor an audio output device. To do anything sane with audio on MacOS requires external applications like Loopback or Blackhole or any of the virtual cable applications.

I don't know what he meant with "audio management", but when it comes to music production, MacOS works way better by default, with system-wide low latency audio and multi-client MIDI drivers. On Windows, you need to buy a dedicated audio card and install 3rd party audio and MIDI drivers, so that you can finally--assuming you bought the correct gear--get almost the same functionality that every Mac has out of the box.

To be fair, core audio is indeed better default system but any trivial music production involves audio interface, I've never seen a person using direct input to macOS. On daily work, it's pretty much same.

Windows used to be horrid when it comed to music production but that was like almost two decades ago. Been using W10 for quite some time and any basics I need is pretty much there.

On the other hand, hardware taxing when gearing up the equipment is insane on apple hardware, that's why I migrated from their ecosystem. It's a huge drawback for many I believe.

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#112

Post by chawyehsu »

syspec wrote: post #31

Any before / after screenshots? I really don't understand when someone makes a project such as this (which seems to have been around for a while), and does not include at least 1 screenshot

There are screenshots in issue [0] shared by users. My MacType profile repo [1] also has screenshots for comparison. You might see differences between screenshots because MacType works with a profile containing customizable configurations which can tweak font rendering behaviors as per demands (and I think this is why the README does not include screenshots).

[0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557

[1] https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#113

Post by chawyehsu »

fleaaaa wrote: post #30
pityJuke wrote: post #11

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.

You can unload dll in the settings.json

Perhaps it was a typo, but actually one can unload dll in the .ini config file.

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#114

Post by simondotau »

mastazi wrote: post #73

I use both Windows and Mac daily and I'm not sure that Mac font rendering is always better. Here is my experience: On low DPI screens (think 24" or 25" at 1080p) I prefer how fonts render in Windows. It seems they have better antialiasing, while Mac fonts look slightly pixelated. However on high DPI screens (13" Retina, 25" 4K etc.) fonts on Mac look sharper while Windows fonts look a bit "soft". So I prefer Mac on t…

I agree that macOS does the better job on high DPI "retina" screens. On low DPI screens I also prefer how certain fonts render in Windows, specifically, only with fonts that have excellent hinting. Verdana and Georgia look great in low resolution on Windows, but non-standard fonts tend to look like garbage.

Putting this in table form:

           | System fonts | Other fonts  |
           |--------------|--------------|
   low DPI | Windows      | macOS        |
  high DPI | macOS        | macOS        |

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#116

Post by jen20 »

nwallin wrote: post #66
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you realize that changing rasterization strategies alters the bounding box of character textures, and that a lot of UI positions are hardcoded, it makes sense.

Hardcoding UI positions is one of those "you're doing it wrong" sorts of things. At my day job, both the UX/UI folks and the localization folks would have a conniption if I built something with hardcoded UI positions/sizes, or that broke if the size of a string changed. As soon as you have a user with a hidpi display your application is going to look like garbage. As soon as you want to try to support non-English lan…

> As soon as you have a user with a hidpi display your application is going to look like garbage.

And this is what my yearly-or-so foray into Windows shows up - most apps look like garbage. The handling of displays with different DPIs connected to one machine is even worse. This has even been a solved problem _on Linux_ for quite some time.

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#117

Post by ricardobeat »

citrin_ru wrote: post #110
crazygringo wrote: post #7

It'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…

> For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes with pixel boundaries which produces sharper letterforms at the cost of distortion of the aesthetic personality of the font Fully agree that it is a personal preference: a slightly distorted shape is something I stop to notice after a day of using the system (I adapt to whatever sha…

You got it backwards on “I adapt to whatever shape font has” though.

The Mac rendering while a little less sharp means letters always have roughly the same shape, as intended by the typeface authors, while the Windows anti-aliasing distorts them unpredictably depending on where and which pixels they fall onto. Two ‘a’s might look slightly different within the same word because they fall into different alignments on the pixel grid. This is what gives it the wonky appearance.

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#118

Post by [deleted] »

formerly_proven wrote: post #103
danybittel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it does.

I don't understand why you write an incorrect comment when checking whether GP is right takes literally seconds in front of a Windows box (open start menu, screenshot, enlarge, clearly not using subpixel AA).

[deleted]

Re: MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

#119

Post by chrismorgan »

hsn915 wrote: post #54
crazygringo wrote: post #7

It'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 never understood _why_ but text rendering on windows has always looked like garbage to me. It was obviously not the screen resolution or anything, because you can run a linux vm (say, on virtualbox) and the text rendering inside the VM will look much better than the text in windows. > Nobody's "right", it's just personal preference. I don't think that's true. macos is clearly better.

macOS mangles font rendering. They have this awfully-named preference called “font smoothing”, enabled by default, which actually enables glyph dilation, which is basically “ignore what the font author said, and make the font fatter than it should be”. This is the worst thing to happen since sliced bread or something. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 gives more details, including the biggest problem: people using overly light fonts because they use macOS that makes them bearable.

Quite apart from that, my understanding (as a non-user of macOS) is that macOS’s font rendering used to be better than it is now, because they used to do subpixel antialiasing but no longer do, preferring to simplify things because it’s not as valuable on high-resolution displays which they mostly (but not consistently) try to shunt people towards. Mind you, it’s still not useless on high-resolution displays, but definitely not as valuable.

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