MacType: Better font rendering for Windows
github.com
github.com
I played around with this back when I used Windows, maybe 5 years ago (so my opinion may be out of date). It made text look better on the laptop screen (high dpi) but worse on external monitors (low dpi). That made sense because Apple doesn't sell anything with a low dpi display, but Windows still needs to care about them, so it does a lot of extra stuff like font hinting to make rendering look good as dpi scales down.
That's a hard pass for me.
what profile did you choose? LCD.ini make the low DPI ones looked way nicer to me, to the point I could live without it. It looked bad on high DPI ones though, so after I upgraded my monitors to 4k I just uninstalled it.
Basically, macOS uses "ideal" font rendering, meaning that all glyph shapes and overall text size is as if they were rendered with infinite resolution and then quantized using the pixel grid; when you increase font size, the text scales linearly.
Windows, on the other hand, adjusts the shapes by snapping vertical and horizontal lines so that they correspond exactly to rows and columns of pixels. This distorts glyph shapes and spacing, but it makes small text (around 8-10pt) much more readable on low-DPI displays.
(Coincidentally, this seems to be why macOS default UI font has always been a bit larger and thicker than Windows.)
There are some screenshots to compare side by side here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...
Top comment from two years ago now is about bad readme and website too.
FWIW I used to use this or a similar application almost a decade ago. This seems like either the same thing or a fork. It made a big difference.
I'm sure you've really motivated them to improve it now!
The comment I responded to was phrased insultingly. There’s no way to start a critique with a phrase of the form “Imagine doing what you’re currently doing” and have it come across positively.
Many people feel entitled to insult things they get for free. If you’re going to critique something you got for free, at least at have the courtesy to lead with the positive.
The comment I responded to lead with the insult and ended there.
Since this is free code they're just giving away, the benefit from marketing it well is just not there. If it's great and you don't install it because it's marketed poorly, that's entirely your loss.
> What if it doesn't do what you imagine? Or changes something that breaks your system? What recourse then? Is it the end user's fault?
This is true even with screenshots and advertisement.
I don't particularly "like" ClearType but I think it gets the job done. Fonts are clear and sharp, albeit a little bit too "noisy". MacType looks blurry as hell, at least on non HiDPI screens.
I don't use Mac, so I don't know how it compare to the native one during the non-retina times.
Clear Type is crisp and clear at pretty much all resolutions for me. It's not the best, but it's clean.
It’s not “dubious”. It clearly improves readability of text on most non-hidpi displays.
Most people don’t have “retina” displays. For most people this is probably preferable.
I don't like the font rendering on macOS, it is mostly OK now that we have very high DPI displays, but at a lower res it is kind of blurry.
IMHO the font rendering on Windows is excellent.
On low dpi screens, yes, it has always been a strength of Windows. Too bad that most apps nowadays are using the awful and blurry Chrome font rendering.
What do you find dubious about pixel boundary alignment?
As a side note, please note Macs don't even offer a means of turning off aliasing anymore, which for folks like myself has serious implications for eye focus under some conditions. For all its faults, ClearType and similar rendering solutions at least allow me to tweak it to both my comfort level and even monitor pixel arrangement.
I get that some people prefer it but a lot of people don't and it's frustrating to be stuck with it. My thinking is that unless there's clearly one best way, and if it's something people have strong opinions about, then a switch or knob to adjust is a good idea.
And it introduces tons of complexities and tradeoffs, namely that it breaks all scaling, adding ugly color fringes. I remember it was such a pain on Windows to remember to disable subpixel rendering every time I needed to take a screenshot to paste into documentation.
And say what you will about ClearType: at least you can turn it off. I recall trying so hard to do the same for my Mac only to find out my instructions, including massive config changes, sadly no longer worked due to a version bump of the OS.
- https://thaomaoh.com/mac-vs-windows/
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-r...
- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20160313114920/http://blog.codin...
It shouldn't matter if all screens are hi-dpi and it's better to disable font smoothing completely in that case. OSX doesn't seem to support it at all after Mojave.
And what about non-hidpi screen? I don't even know why people are about to read small text of such complex character without sub-pixel anti-alias.
I can highly recommend the LG UltraFine 5K in case you're looking. I've been using it for years, and it's been a dream.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1499337-REG/lg_27md5k...
As other comments have alluded to though, it’s a hack and so it unfortunately doesn’t work everywhere and sometimes breaks things.
Font rendering might seem like a small thing, but it’s big enough of a thing for me that I have a hard time using Windows for dev work because of it, though programs that bring their own font rendering systems can sometimes be used as a workaround.
The great thing about MacType is it can somewhat fix the horrible font rendering of some application, like the older versions of Chromium (until they disable that DirectWrite option). You can also replace the default fonts for each application, too. And East Asia fonts will look way better.
MacType is not that useful for high DPI screens, but it is a must for lower DPI one, as long as you chose the right profile (and tweak it as you like, too).
looking forward to running this
These days fonts are all blurry on regular displays and each new version of macOS makes harder to fix this. First they took the "Use antialiased fonts" option in the system settings, then the `defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing` command became unreliable.
Hoping eventually someone will figure out how to tweak the system renderer using third party tools and create a "MacType for Mac" to fix the mess that Apple refuses to fix.
The way this is phrased is kinda weird considering that the vast majority of macOS users have HiDPI displays.
An ever-increasing amount of text in Windows since Windows 8 has been using DirectWrite, much more than "Clear Type". A lot of people still colloquially lump DirectWrite under their idea of "Clear Type" (the GDI+ Clear Type and DirectWrite are obviously designed to "get along" and live side-by-side and share some characteristics) but there's even more of a "version difference" between DirectWrite and Clear Type than many think especially those still thinking of "Clear Type" as in the Windows XP setting.
To my understanding, Windows 11 doesn't do anything substantially new from Windows 8+ other than it has iterated much further on moving as much as it can of "everything" in the base OS rendering to DirectWrite and out of GDI+. (But DirectWrite itself has been around since Windows 8. Though I'm probably making a similar mistake in thinking that DirectWrite hasn't changed substantially much in its versions since then.) Presumably that has been a motivating factor in the taskbar rewrites and context menu rewrites that many dislike about Windows 11, removing more and more GDI from common paths.
Dunno about everyone else but I tend to avoid downloading and running arbitrary unexplained stuff.
Why would I even think about trying this out if the author can't be bothered to write a couple of sentences about it, or god forbid maybe post some screenshots?
Think different, indeed.
"Better" is subjective but it's safe to assume it makes Windows' font rendering look like that of macOS.