On 6 Sep 2010, at 5:01 am, Kris Maglione wrote:
On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 11:28:17PM -0400, Josh Rickmar wrote:
On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 11:02:58PM -0400, Kris Maglione wrote:
I still don't think that the auto-hinter is nearly up to par with
designer hinted fonts. For the fonts that I have screen and print
varieties from different foundaries, the versions without hinting
information look considerably worse on-screen (though better in
print) than the auto-hinted varieties.
This all really depends on how you like your fonts rendered. When
Apple first ported Safari to Windows, everyone was screaming about
how the fonts looked like crap. The Apply way is to use little
hinting and respect the shape of the font glyphs, while the Microsoft
way is to hammer the font into the pixel grid so it looks sharper,
but also causes the original typeface's unique shape to suffer.
Personally, I prefer the autohinter since I've found that with
slight hinting it looks very similar to the way Apple renders their
fonts. I don't know if Apple uses an autohinter or the hints in
the font, but they certainly put a lot less emphasis on the hinting
and more on the shape.
Generally, if you like your fonts sharp on screen (Microsoft),
designer hints are usually the best. If you want your fonts to
look more like print (Apple), using the autohinter seems to work
better.
Not that this matters much, as I spend most of my time staring at
bitmaped monospace fonts.
Apple's font rendering engine and display screens are miles beyond
Microsoft's or Freetype's. If either of them could match the
quality of font rendering on a MacBook, I'd be all for it, but
instead of the crisp, high contrast fonts you get on an Mac, you
just wind up with fonts with blurry edges that are ugly and hard to
read.
I think you're right for OS X 10.5 and 10.6, I had 10.5 on my PC for
6 months & never noticed a problem, but I'm reading this on an old
iBook running 10.4 and the anti-aliasing is *crap!* It's funny, I've
had this machine sat next to a linux box with freetype's autohinter
and the linux machine's screen was so much more readable. Perhaps
it's because this iBook doesn't have its original screen, but I've
done my best to calibrate it.
