… for my enduring love for OS X. Our relationship has been strained lately, but this article reminded me why Apple melts my heart. It’s all about text rendering.

A big problem with today’s computer displays is their resolution. It’s very low — 96 dots per inch is standard, whereas low-quality inkjet printing starts around 150dpi — and text is usually displayed at very small sizes. The problem with this is that suddenly each letter is only 5-10 pixels high, which is a staggeringly small amount of detail to work with. Many systems have been devised to make the most of the handful of pixels available; here’s a quick intro.

From the first article:

I’ll start with a tough statement. Microsoft played a dirty trick on the world. Windows XP way of text rendering has zero taste and zero engineering culture. Their text looks sharp and eye catching but wrong.

A lot of people don’t appreciate this, and I don’t blame them. It’s a trivial detail, one that’s unnoticeable save for a general feeling of “blurry” vs. “crisp”. Many people prefer crisp, but typefaces are works of art, and Microsoft’s way takes each letterform’s painstaking design for granted, opting for crisp lines over spacing and preservation of shape.

Furthermore, the article’s main point is that because Microsoft designed its rendering system in such as way as to work poorly when scaled to different dpi values, there is no motivation for display manufacturers to make higher-resolution displays. Enter Apple, with proprietary hardware and Leopard’s vector graphics, taking us into the future. Imagine a 20-inch monitor at, say, 8000×8000 resolution. It would be like nothing you’ve ever seen.

The article’s author dislikes Apple’s method of text rendering, but given the two, I will always choose the method that preserves the works of the type designers. Fonts are beautiful, and they should be beautiful no matter where they’re viewed.