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Comment by edeion | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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.

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.

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