Prof, some time ago there was a great visual explanation of the ways the the fonts on both platforms differ. It may have been posted when we were back at the other place but I can't find it now. Do you remember the webpage I am thinking of? It showed how the a's and g's differed amongst other things.

In some cases the Apple way was better and in some the MS way was better.

Any help finding the link from anyone who remembers it greatly appreciated my googling skills have let me down.

Something like this? Clicky

The blurriness is the one thing that really irks me with my iMac, other than that it is brilliant.

I have grown used to it over the last couple of years, but the "slightly out of focus" look of the text makes my eyes ache after a while, whist I can sit the whole day in front of a Windows PC without any problems.

I also have problems with cinemas and projectors in general, where they aren't 100% correctly focused. My left eye is weak, made worse by my medication (Alopurinol). When I have to look at something out of focus or blurry, my left eye really aches and after a while, a nerve starts twitching in the lower eyelid.

The iMac doesn't really set off the twitching, but it does make me tired more quickly than a Windows display and my vision is more blurry after working on the iMac for long periods of time than on a Windows PC...

But on the PC, with Safari, 99.9% of what is viewed is never going to be printed, it is going to be read on the screen, so why does it have to be accurate to a paper representation of the font? Surely it should just be readable?

Yes, the fonts (same fonts on Mac and Windows) are rendered in a crisper form, which squashes them to conform to a grid, to allow them to be displayed in a better form for the screen. Yes, that won't match up 1-1 with a printed version, but given how much I generally print, that isn't a problem.

Adobe's Reader suffers a lot worse though, most documents fonts are totally unreadable on a computer screen at 100% magnification, they are jagged or blurred and incredibly hard to read.

I like the way OS X works and I like the compactness of my iMac, but if I had a choice, I'd dump the OS X font rendering engine for one that displayed the fonts without blurriness on the screen.

That's the one.

Cheers veato. I can see the advantages of each. I personally spend so little time looking a PC font renderings that when I do get to see them the just look wrong to me. I can easily see that the reverse would also be true.

It's a shame that OSX doesn't have something like ClearType on Windows. I know you can do the font smoothing thing in Safari (which I turn off because it kills my eyes), but I don't think you can do anything like that for the whole OS.

It would be nice, seeing as things look crisp on Windows, and when you move to OSX it can strain your eyes.

That's not a stab at OSX btw, remember I love the OS.

Fin: You can't use this for App Store, but have you tried using EphPod for syncing your songs? It's miles better than iTunes, and doesn't take over your PC with Bonjour and the likes when you install it. I use it, and then just struggle with the iPoT's built-in App Store.

See, in the illustration above, I just think the Windows rendering looks wrong. It irritates me. The bottom of the G should be a proper descender, rather then being lost in the underline.

I take your points about non-printed materials, but I still like my fonts to be rendered as they would be in the real world. Windows just looks lazily rendered, and then doesn't make 'sense' to me. Just MHO, you understand.

The Windows rendering of bold text does not look too bad. The anorexic look of standard text is what looks wrong to me.


Though as I said before a lot depends on what you are used to.

I've never spent a significant amount of time in front of a Mac but I now think the Windows 'g' looks wrong.

Nice price at Play.com, I think I'll give em a go.

Cheers chaps.


I should bloody hope the improvement is amazing. You really meant £500? Not a typo?