Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerome-jh | Hacker News Reader

I hate antialiasing. I absolutely cannot stand blurry fonts. First thing I do on a Linux box is install the ambiguously licensed "mscorefonts" and disable antialiasing everywhere possible. That is explained in the font-howto that may be a bit outdated now.

Verdana for the interface, Times New Roman, Courier New for monospace ... aaaaahhhhh!

View on HN

The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you joking? But I wonder to myself: what does he call blurry fonts. Anti-aliased fonts, of course. But I've never seen them as blurry and I guess most other people don't, otherwise we'd not like them better. Don't you think there could be a sight specificity? Do you have extremely sharp eyesight?

Windows does antialias in a special way. MacOS and Linux are usually configured to respect the font shapes, using subpixels as needed. Windows font rendering prefers to snap to the nearest pixel, increasing sharpness but not being as faithful to the letter shapes.

Some people don't care, some people get used to both, but for some people going from Windows to anything else is difficult.

This is called hinting, it's configurable on Linux (don't know about MacOS).

It's taking time to get used to. Windows did and still does very strongly hinted fonts. When I first started using Linux blurriness annoyed me greatly, but after few years I don't care anymore.

I fell in love with MacOS when I discovered I can scale text or web pages to arbitrary values—without letters losing their shapes unless I stick to certain numbers.

You can get strong hinting by changing hintstyle to hintstrong in fontconfig. It doesn't match Windows completely, but for some fonts it's close.

Infinality-fontconfig used to be the thing for emulating the font rendering of other operating systems, I haven't kept up since freetype merged the various interpreter tweaks that used to be proprietary. I'm sure you can pass options to fontconfig/freetype to tweak it to your liking.

I stick to hintslight now and I'm perfectly happy with the results.

There is certainly a taste specificity, but no sight specificity. I must admit none of the laptops at home are very new, and at work I still use the 2 monitors I received when I arrived 8 years ago.

I like my fonts sharp (and pixelated if required) and I truly think e.g. Verdana 8 and 10 are a marvel of legibility, without antialiasing but with hinting, as explained below or in the font-howto.

There is one of my daughter's laptop, Windows 10, where I never succeeded in having the fonts right, whichever Cleartype setting or without Cleartype. This is so disappointing when tech that used to work so good gets broken.

Get a hidpi screen.

Ah, a kindred spirit. I do pretty much the same thing, and also use Terminus 9 in the terminal, where I spend most of my time these days.

I might eventually adopt antialiased fonts when I get a monitor with high enough resolution. For now, on a 96-dpi monitor, it's sharp fonts all the way. I can tell the difference after a day's work. Sharp fonts are easier on my eyes.

I can remember years ago trying to get Pidgin (the MSN Messenger client for Linux) to compile _with_ anti-aliasing enabled. This was not default for TCL/TK based programs at the time. Horrible! :)

I'm the opposite. First thing I do on a Linux box if I don't have a HiDPI screen is that I'll turn off hinting everywhere. Without hinting antialiasing truly shines.

And I do the exact opposite. I load gnome-tweaks and set hinting to none, so I can get the full anti aliasing effect.

Isn't freedom nice?

I also never understood why people like blurry fonts so much. To me, win2k fonts were much better than the ones we have today.

I guess it‘s because Apple did it.

There are no blurry fonts if you use the right screens for 2020 - i.e. HiDPI / "retina" etc.

If your pixels are visible then yeah, nothing beats fonts designed for big pixels.

There are blurry fonts on 1080p screens, which are the default to this day and essentially required if you seek high refresh rates on a budget.

Everyone without a retina screen is wrong, according to you. And yet, fonts used to look just fine on our terrible screens.

I didn’t say that - I said that if your screen is not retina-like, then you have to adjust operating systems that are now developed for retina-like screens.

I have not seen a blurry font on Mac since 2012 - with the exception of legacy programs that don’t use modern libraries, because (again) modern libraries and modern screens simply don’t give you blurry fonts. If you have some legacy tech in your stack, then you have to do some work to compensate.

Ah, the usual "you're using it wrong".

Apple can tweak their font rendering and favor hi-DPI screens if they want, but there's no excuse for messing up with settings that worked well in the past. Is it that hard for mac OS to automatically adjust these settings?

Apple sold their awfully shiny 27" Thunderbolt display until 2016 after all.

This is really weird. I've stuck to Apple as much as possible since 2012 precisely because their handling of text is consistently top-notch on good screens without having to do anything. But according to you and the other guy above, that's wrong, because the default experience should be "old tech first". It's a bit like saying that tablets and phones should have a serial port instead of USB-C because "not everyone can afford a better cable".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com