Improving type anti-aliasing in Jaguar

D

dflett

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I have just moved from a Dell XP notebook to a 12" Powerbook and in almost every respect I have made the right decision.

But the text antialiasing!!!! What has Apple done - do they use LCDs in Cupertino? From staring too close to my Safari page I see green and red tinges so they are using sub-pixel rendering (just not very well)

It's terrible: fuzzy with greyed verticals and horizontals most of the time. I got used to the superb cleartype implementation in XP. is there an implementation for OS X?

Sorry if this question's been asked before by previous newbies but I google-ized but found nothing.
 
I know what you mean, but I don't see it at all on the 17" screen I use. However, if you want normal, pre-Jaguar anti aliasing, you can try going to General in System Preferences, and think using the CRT option turns off sub pixel rendering because CRTs usually don't support it.
 

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Thanks for the suggestion, I tried them all and came back to the original LCD setting. I find its very font dependent so I suspect the hinting is the problem - Verdana for instance looks OK. Maybe its worse on the powerbook screen, but I don't think so because I can run XP on virtualPC at the same time and turn on ClearType and XP's rendering of the same webpage fonts is much better.
 
Hmmm. I'd be quite interested to see a screenshot of OS X's and VPC's rendering of the same type side-by-side. Care to share?

- Brian
 
I have taken the screen shots of the two running side by side but I don't know if I can 'attach' them to a reply or not. And my sysadm has re-arranged my web servers so I'll need to find out which actual server to FTP to so I can post a link. Finally, if you are desparate I can email them to you (50K and 500K tifs) from david dot flett at fdnassociates dot com. If anyone knows if/how I can attach graphics direct to the thread please post ;-)

P.S. I guess it goes without saying that unless you actually view the screenshots with an LCD screen they will just look odd. Cleartype on a CRT is not pretty.
 
OK, found my webserver again :-) Apologies for the slow download - its a slow link. The images are at
http://www.safedataco.com/~dave/osx_versus_xp_BIG.tif
and
http://www.safedataco.com/~dave/osx_versus_xp_SMALL.tif
The big one is 488K and the whole desktop and the small just shows some text comparison (51K) I turned on LZW compression but they are still huge - sorry.
I draw your attention to the verticals on the l and d of 'Visit other Apple sites around the world'. XP keeps the vertical within a pixel and therefore black while OS X renders both on a pixel boundary giving both a fuzzy look. You will only see what I mean on an LCD since that will display the subpixel rendering as it was meant to be enjoyed.
OS X is clearly staying more true to the letterform at these small text sizes while XP use the hinting to adjust the letterform - note the spacing between the w and o - XP shifts the left vertical of the o to be clearer but it collides slightly with the w. But staying true to letterform is hardly an argument for fuzzy text in a browser IMO. Another example is the second i in 'Visit'. With XP it is rendered cleanly with very little cleartype. On OS X it is almost pink for heaven's sake - what is that about. Roll on 300dpi LCDs I say ;)
A better test could be to write a page that specifically uses the same font rather than the browser default but that is not really the point. To see just how good XPs cleartype is check the anti aliasing on the XP desktop icons compared to the jaggies on the icons which show the true resolution of the pixels. Also, if you get the chance to use XP tablet edition on the new tablet PCs check out how good their 'digital ink' looks. One point to XP for this (and only this) at least I think - I still prefer OS X though:) Especially if Apple finally releases a stable Java 1.4.1
 
In that shot, Mac OS X's text looks crappily colorful while XP's just barely looks anti-aliased.

I prefer XP's to OS X's in your screen shot, but OS X's non-sub-pixel rendering on a CRT beats 'em both. :)

Thanks for the pics. Very interesting indeed... I can see why people say XP's is better than OS X's, but I still don't think XP's is that good.

- Brian
 
I believe XPs is probably as you can do with the current generation (i.e. resolution) of LCDs. There are better ones coming - I think IBM will sell you one at around 300 dpi for around 10,000 Euros (!) but that brings more problems with OSes and applications just not being designed for that high a resolution. For example, how small would an aqua radio button be at 300 dpi? Way to small to aim with a mouse I suspect.

I haven't tried the Mac on a CRT - might do tonight though after your comments but no doubt you are correct - it looks as though it will be much better. But one has to ask how relevant that is? Apple want's 50% of its sales to be laptops and the new Imac's come with LCD displays and presumably most people buying powermacs in non-server situations buy Apple's cinema displays so I think they (Apple) should be improving this. As a software developer the quality of the monotype fonts really matters to me. If anyone can recommend a replacement non-proportional fonts I'd be interested in trying them out.
 
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