Religious font wars, part deux

Tony Schreiner has gotten into the conversation that Scoble and Dudley are having over font aliasing in OS X vs ClearType in Windows XP, and has posted a great test page showing how everyday fonts render for him at various sizes.

However, what Tony and all of the Scoble commentators seem to have missed is the fact that ClearType is designed to be tuned to an individual's color perception. In other words, if I set it to look great for my eyes, you might take one look at it and see a blurry color-fringed mess. I urge everyone to go spend 10 minutes watching Bill Hill's excellent videos on Channel 9 - “How Does ClearType Work?” and “Why Isn't ClearType On By Default?”. At the very least, you'll come back with the ultimate “yeah? well it looks better to me” answer to any rendering argument :-) And who knows, you might even turn out to be one of the super-color-sensitive individuals for whom ClearType will always look bad.

I, of course, wish I'd known all this back when I made my first post on font choices…

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 29, 2004
  How does S Gibson's sub pixel font rendering (http://grc.com/cleartype.htm) fit into all this?
  RCH
• Anonymous
  April 30, 2004
  Steve's page seems to be a good explanation of the basic theory behind ClearType, but it doesn't go into e,g, the user-perception issues of how you tune the system for an individual's color-space.