Musings on Font Rendering

I read an interesting article today on font rendering and anti-aliasing on Mac vs. Windows systems.

I actually like both approaches, being a Mac user who originally fled to Windows 95 after the demise of the Amiga (a platform with some of the best typography of all time - far superior to that of Mac OS in those years.)

I think that Apple needs to support a style of font rendering that more closely resembles ClearType. Fonts on screen and fonts in print are two different use cases. I am a big believer in bitmap fonts and screen fonts, and I don’t think that these things have to get in the way of having clear vector rendering for Desktop Publishing applications.

Sadly, anti-aliasing routines are a nuance at best and an afterthought at worst in today’s whiz-bang feature obsessed OS market. I just wish Adobe would license the anti-aliasing routines of Microsoft and Apple for Photoshop to do accurate testing of font rendering in mockups. Adobe’s routines are awesome - but they don’t closely enough resemble the OS X, Win XP, or Win Vista font rendering to be precise enough for web and application oriented mockups.

Speaking of fonts - when is somebody going to come up with a cross-platform, open standard for embedded fonts over the web? Using the overhead of Flash is a hack at best for the sole purpose font embedding on a web page, and is of course proprietary technology. Everyone gets so excited about Web 2.0, CSS, and AJAX, but we’re all still using the same stupid, limited selection of default web fonts that Microsoft put out in the late 90s.