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MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

142 points by tinbucket 5y ago

speedgoose 5y ago
I connect my Windows 10 thinkpad and my M1 macbook to the same old 1080p external screens, and I prefer the Windows 10 text rendering. The MacOS text rendering looks a bit bolder and a bit more blurry. On the laptops screen, the high pixel density hides the difference.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Yup. Apple fonts look good because they make them all nice and chonky which avoids all the technically correct hinting that preserves actual font shape but doesn’t look as nice in the end that Windows does. I have a metric compatible clone of the SF Mono font installed on Windows. To get it to look the same as it does on macOS, I have to use the Medium weight to account for this.
- toxik 5y ago
  Agreed, on low-res screens, I actually prefer completely unaliased text rendering. It looks jagged and I like the kind of retro vibe it gives.
- ivank 5y ago
  Try defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 on macOS. That will stop it from making every font more bold than it should be. Mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
- PakistaniDenzel 5y ago
  Yup definitely agree with this. MacOS rendering is horrendous on normal monitors, it only looks good on 4k monitors, whereas Windows looks decent on everything.
- tokamak-teapot 5y ago
  It looks a bit more blurry because it _is_ a bit more blurry. As another commenter explained a little, Windows' font rendering attempts to 'cut off' at pixel boundaries for straight edges, making characters appear sharper. This is at the expense of being less true to the font design. I used to prefer the Windows text rendering for this reason, but since so-called 'Retina' screens, everything looks the same to me.
maxharris 5y ago
no screenshots?
- csnover 5y ago
  There are screenshots in an issue on their bug tracker[0]. This is an interesting project—Windows’s font rendering is definitely one of the things I dislike about it the most—and they are doing themselves a disservice by not actually explaining clearly what it is or does. I wish Microsoft would provide a font rendering mode like this by default since from reviewing some of the wiki & README it sounds like this is some crazy hack that hooks into apps to intercept calls to DirectWrite and GDI and might break the entire OS. [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557
rubatuga 5y ago
Good way to run into cryptic font rendering bugs.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  MacType effectively replaces GDI's font renderer (DirectWrite replacement is experimental) with FreeType (used on Linux, not sure about Mac). If you enable ttfautohint ("Auto tuning") instead of bytecode hinting ("Standard tuning"), the fonts may end up with different metrics, and cut off the tops and bottoms of characters. There's a workaround where you can tell MacType to report larger font metrics than GDI would, but this apparently causes rendering errors as well. Another bug is that MacType makes Sublime Text in GDI font rendering mode chop off the right side of wide CJK characters. Enabling MacType's experimental DirectWrite support makes Sublime Text's DirectWrite text fuzzier, but not chopped off.
fallenspec 5y ago
I had listened to an interview with the original cleartype author on a podcast almost a decade ago now. IIRC He said that when Apple got the cleartype patent (due to the Apple/Microsoft cross patent agreement that happened in the late 90s), they kinda messed up the implementation of cleartype and Windows actually implements it correctly and Mac OS X (now Mac OS) doesn't. So I find this somewhat amusing.
- seltzered_ 5y ago
  You might be thinking of the interview with the late Bill Hill (2011), co-creator of ClearType : https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-5-typo https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-5-typo
yepthatsreality 5y ago
I don’t use Windows anymore (Pop_os and FreeBSD) but never had an issue with how the fonts rendered. The site doesn’t seem to indicate anymore information either.
- blehn 5y ago
  Windows biases for a sharper text appearance, whereas Mac is much smoother. I can see why some folks prefer the sharp look, but fonts on Windows often look nothing like what the designer intended. Mac is a lot more true to the font design.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    Honestly, I prefer the Windows sharpness much to the aesthetic and font design that the author of the font wants. Fonts are a nice for styling a document or website, but in the end the text is designed to be read, not to be art. If the designer only tested on macOS, I don't think this has anything to do with what the designer "intended". It just shows a lack of testing on other platforms, something that happens quite often (i.e. when dealing with scrollbars [1]). Personally, I dislike the vague, blurry rendering macOS uses. Macs usually compensate for their weird, blurry, bold rendering with high-resolution screens, but on lower resolutions I really dislike the way fonts look on macOS. [1]: https://svenkadak.com/blog/scrollbar-blindness https://svenkadak.com/blog/scrollbar-blindness
didibus 5y ago
I just switched from Windows to a Mac, and I immediately found that the colors and contrast and the clarity of images and text on the same monitor I connect my laptop too improved. I wasn't sure if it was just in my head, but something about the rendering in Mac seems better to me. I don't know if they have better calibration for colors and contrast, better anti-aliasing, etc., but I seem to see the screen much better and my eyes don't strain as much.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Have you tried to use the windows ClearType Text Tuner to improve the font rendering? Windows tries to take advantage of subpixels to improve crispness but it can cause color fringing which makes text harder to read. The tuner utility helps with that. You can also disable cleartype entirely to get standard anti-aliasing, which is what macOS does on non-retina screens. Personally I find the macOS way of rendering on standard dpi displays a bit too blurry. As for images, the only difference I can imagine is a different handling of color profiles. Update: I totally forgot about the mixed dpi situation. When you hook up a monitor of a different dpi than the laptop (e.g. the laptop is 150% scaling but the monitor is 100%, or vice versa), then only one display will be perfectly crisp for all apps, and that's the primary display at login. Only applications designed to take advantage of the right scaling API's will look crisp on both displays in that case. The other ones will look blurry on the non-primary display. MacOS does tend to handle that situation a little bit better.
  - ghusbands 5y ago
    The text drawn in most places doesn't match the cleartype tuner (try choosing the most grayscale option each time), and the cleartype in general doesn't take into account screen rotation. Turning off cleartype leaves you with text with odd per-pixel kerning.
  - vborovikov 5y ago
    There is a fix for apps that are blurry on the non-primary low-res display. Go to the app properties and on the Compatibility tab click the button 'Change high DPI setting' and check 'Override high DPI scaling behavior' option. Make sure 'Application' is selected in the 'Scaling performed by:' drop-down list. The blurry apps will render a bit bigger on the non-primary low-res display but everything will be crisp.
crazygringo 5y ago
It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes with pixel boundaries which produces sharper letterforms at the cost of distortion of the aesthetic personality of the font, while Mac antialiases more to faithfully maintain the accurate letterforms of a typeface, at the cost of being blurrier. It's basically the tabs-vs-spaces debate of font rendering. Nobody's "right", it's just personal preference. Fortunately, high-resolution "retina" style displays make the distinction much less important, in the same way that it's entirely irrelevant in high-resolution printing.
- krona 5y ago
  I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing. Prior to very high pixel density screens, I hated the Mac/android font rendering, mostly due to the migraines caused by my eyes straining to correct for the seemly out-of-focus text blur.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    >I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing. It's mostly hinting. Windows actually doesn't do subpixel antialiasing in many applications anymore. (such as Start menu or new Settings panel)
    - danybittel 5y ago
      Of course it does.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
jbverschoor 5y ago
I've disabled any subpixel rendering a long time ago. It's annoying, and makes the text look weird. It's not needed for hidpi screens. Ancient tech
pityJuke 5y ago
MacType works nice on the surface, but using it feels like a bit of a minefield, because if it interacts incorrectly with one of your programs, it can be an annoyance, and because you've gotten used to the font rendering, you might not immediately realize. When playing Riot's VALORANT, it caused massive lag spikes - and that was before I started worrying about the anticheat.
- cshokie 5y ago
  Indeed. It seems to inject code into every process on the system. That increases the risk to the system more than any typical standalone program.
- fleaaaa 5y ago
  You can unload dll in the settings.json
  - chawyehsu 5y ago
    Perhaps it was a typo, but actually one can unload dll in the .ini config file.
    - fleaaaa 5y ago
      Yup thanks, my brain farted!
- errantspark 5y ago
  While MacType's delivery method is wild, Valorant anti-hack is a problem, and normalizing that sort of thing is also a problem. Riot games is a bunch of arrogant cowboys who think they know better than everyone else, yet somehow other folks have managed to make anti hack systems that are just as effective and much less intrusive.
jasperry 5y ago
I'm glad this is still being developed. I tried it out around the time Windows 8/10 came out, because to my taste the Cleartype settings were much worse than in Windows 7. However, MacType didn't help with Metro programs, or with Word 2013, in which Microsoft switched to a non-subpixel renderer for the document and made everything a jagged mess. What were they thinking? As another commenter said, moving toward higher DPI makes this less necessary. But I'm still bitter over the years of ugliness I had to suffer through after having such nice Cleartype rendering in Windows XP and 7.
keb_ 5y ago
Call me nuts, but I enjoy font-rendering on my Windows machines even compared to my Ubuntu laptop. I legitimately find them sharper and easier to read.
- DamnInteresting 5y ago
  Same here. My primary work machines have all been Macs for years now, I find Mac to be a far better environment than Windows in most respects. The two main exceptions are gaming and font rendering, both of which Windows seems to do much better.
tambourine_man 5y ago
One of the reasons I avoided Windows all these years. It seems a little brittle though. Messing with font rendering is such a basic OS feature. I wonder if it could ever be made robust without the help from the oficial vendor.
syspec 5y ago
Any before / after screenshots? I really don't understand when someone makes a project such as this (which seems to have been around for a while), and does not include at least 1 screenshot
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  Yeah, I thought this was a library for app developers to build on, like Skia. But people are saying it's meant to inject code into existing processes. The heck is it?
- chawyehsu 5y ago
  There are screenshots in issue [0] shared by users. My MacType profile repo [1] also has screenshots for comparison. You might see differences between screenshots because MacType works with a profile containing customizable configurations which can tweak font rendering behaviors as per demands (and I think this is why the README does not include screenshots). [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 [1] https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots
- c-c-c-c-c 5y ago
  Here are some good comparisons. Pity that its not easier to find, been using it for 4 days now and really enjoying it. https://imgur.com/a/mJWl5 https://imgur.com/a/mJWl5
behnamoh 5y ago
I've been using this for a while and am quite happy with the results. Although, I had to create my own customized profile for the best results. The effect is esp. obvious when working on Word documents. Somehow fonts are not rendered "thick" enough in Word, and this app takes care of that. Honestly, I wish MS would do something about blurred fonts in some of the not-so-old programs. Some parts of the Windows OS itself are not rendered correctly!!
lxe 5y ago
I do not prefer this type of font smoothing. In fact I think that windows does a better job at it at certain 4k scaling than Mac does.
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
WindowsType: Better Font Render for Mac
artemiszx 5y ago
A bit of context: this software is popular in China for tweaking Windows font rendering of CJK text (the author is also Chinese language-speaking). Hence the project is only fully localized in Chinese & English, and that the README is fairly simple because most people searching for it already know what it is for.
mastazi 5y ago
I use both Windows and Mac daily and I'm not sure that Mac font rendering is always better. Here is my experience: On low DPI screens (think 24" or 25" at 1080p) I prefer how fonts render in Windows. It seems they have better antialiasing, while Mac fonts look slightly pixelated. However on high DPI screens (13" Retina, 25" 4K etc.) fonts on Mac look sharper while Windows fonts look a bit "soft". So I prefer Mac on those.
- simondotau 5y ago
  I agree that macOS does the better job on high DPI "retina" screens. On low DPI screens I also prefer how certain fonts render in Windows, specifically, only with fonts that have excellent hinting. Verdana and Georgia look great in low resolution on Windows, but non-standard fonts tend to look like garbage. Putting this in table form: | System fonts | Other fonts | |--------------|--------------| low DPI | Windows | macOS | high DPI | macOS | macOS |
  - mastazi 5y ago
    interesting point, initially I did not consider the fact that some fonts might render better than others. Also, I'm a big fan of the Whirlpool forums ;-) (I've noticed "dotau" in your username so I had a look at your profile).
bruhsfx2 5y ago
Good to see MacType discussed here. This tool is more important in Chinese/Japanese/Korean environment as CJK glyphs have more strokes per character as compared to Latin languages. Windows's font rendering tends to fit glyph strokes into pixels (tint). On a low DPI settings (<100), fonts on Windows look more sharp and clear, while on macOS, which discards the bitmaps altogether, the result is blurry (albeit I still prefer to be able to appreciate the original design). On a higher DPI settings (>130), IMO under normal font sizes (>=10pt) the font has enough pixel realestate to behave like what it was designed. The antialiasing could do its job without relying the heavily hinted result. Here are some comparisons. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhoCr9GUYAAjzMG?format=webp https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhoCr9GUYAAjzMG?format=webp Left: AppleWin (Safari for Windows) | Right: Chromium | 12px PingFang SC on 200% system scale As you can clearly see, Apple's font rendering makes every glyph clear enough while ensuring every stroke has the same weight, while Chromium, relying on Windows's font rendering makes the font jagged (stroke width varies), baseline not level (遵守 on the 3rd last line, component 辶's bottom is way up) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJUJZL8UYAAC7sC?format=webp&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJUJZL8UYAAC7sC?format=webp&name... Left: AppleWin | Right: Chromium | 15px MS Gothic on 200% system scale MS Gothic has a very large character design, but on the first line of paragraph, 口 from "口周辺" is not reaching the the height it supposed to do, because of Window's approach of fitting that stroke into a line of pixels. And Windows makes the font thinner. This approach apparently ruined every diagonal strokes like 丿 and 丶, making those strokes even fainter. I have another example of Microsoft Yahei font being drastically better on 200% with MacType but I couldn't find it at the moment. It's suffice to say that MacType will recovered the font rendering for Windows in 200% scale. However, in 100% scale, it provides fixes when Windows messed up with fonts in some cases when it purposefully fit the strokes into pixels. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStIiU0AA01uT?format=webp&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStIiU0AA01uT?format=webp&name... Safari for Windows, 100% scale https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStMyV4AE_b6f?format=webp&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStMyV4AE_b6f?format=webp&name... Vivaldi, 100% scale Font rendered on Vivaldi is thin, not equal stroke width, with jagged curves. It's miles better on Safari on Windows. Just look at the "产品" on the bottom left, Windows makes the upper 口 in the 品 painfully short in height. While i appreciate Windows's effort to make glyphs more legible for lower pixel density displays, but at least provide a toggle to turn it off as it literally ruins everything else. Fonts MS used in every Office/Windows/even Windows Terminal showcase video are not hinted font yet the glyphs look pretty legible, and even gorgeous (if you appreciate the curves of Segeo UI) in a 4:2:0 subsampled video, animated, yet average Windows users can't find a way to experience this on daily basis without MacType.
bluedino 5y ago
Linux is another story. Debian looks different from Ubuntu which looks different than vanilla RHEL
uranusjr 5y ago
Didn’t see it mentioned yet, so I’m going to drop the link. Joel Spolsky did a very good writeup in 2007 (back when Apple released Safari for Windows) on the different font rendering strategies Mac and Windows take. MacType is, fundamentally, an attempt to implement Mac’s font rendering algorithm on Windows. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-anti-aliasing-and-sub-pixel-rendering/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...
remix2000 5y ago
The best font rendering I’ve ever seen was on a ChromeOS sdpi (1360x600) netbook. I wish I’d known how to achieve that kind of rendering on an ordinary Linux computer…
chawyehsu 5y ago
Glad MacType is still being developed, it's been a software existing for over a decade. And it has been with me for 8 years so far.
thom 5y ago
Does anybody know of any studies comparing reading performance (speed/comprehension) of various font technologies on different platforms?

142 points by tinbucket 5y ago

I connect my Windows 10 thinkpad and my M1 macbook to the same old 1080p external screens, and I prefer the Windows 10 text rendering. The MacOS text rendering looks a bit bolder and a bit more blurry. On the laptops screen, the high pixel density hides the difference.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
Yup. Apple fonts look good because they make them all nice and chonky which avoids all the technically correct hinting that preserves actual font shape but doesn’t look as nice in the end that Windows does. I have a metric compatible clone of the SF Mono font installed on Windows. To get it to look the same as it does on macOS, I have to use the Medium weight to account for this.
toxik 5y ago
Agreed, on low-res screens, I actually prefer completely unaliased text rendering. It looks jagged and I like the kind of retro vibe it gives.
ivank 5y ago
Try defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 on macOS. That will stop it from making every font more bold than it should be. Mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
PakistaniDenzel 5y ago
Yup definitely agree with this. MacOS rendering is horrendous on normal monitors, it only looks good on 4k monitors, whereas Windows looks decent on everything.
tokamak-teapot 5y ago
It looks a bit more blurry because it _is_ a bit more blurry. As another commenter explained a little, Windows' font rendering attempts to 'cut off' at pixel boundaries for straight edges, making characters appear sharper. This is at the expense of being less true to the font design. I used to prefer the Windows text rendering for this reason, but since so-called 'Retina' screens, everything looks the same to me.

maxharris 5y ago

no screenshots?

csnover 5y ago
There are screenshots in an issue on their bug tracker[0]. This is an interesting project—Windows’s font rendering is definitely one of the things I dislike about it the most—and they are doing themselves a disservice by not actually explaining clearly what it is or does. I wish Microsoft would provide a font rendering mode like this by default since from reviewing some of the wiki & README it sounds like this is some crazy hack that hooks into apps to intercept calls to DirectWrite and GDI and might break the entire OS. [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557

rubatuga 5y ago

Good way to run into cryptic font rendering bugs.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
MacType effectively replaces GDI's font renderer (DirectWrite replacement is experimental) with FreeType (used on Linux, not sure about Mac). If you enable ttfautohint ("Auto tuning") instead of bytecode hinting ("Standard tuning"), the fonts may end up with different metrics, and cut off the tops and bottoms of characters. There's a workaround where you can tell MacType to report larger font metrics than GDI would, but this apparently causes rendering errors as well. Another bug is that MacType makes Sublime Text in GDI font rendering mode chop off the right side of wide CJK characters. Enabling MacType's experimental DirectWrite support makes Sublime Text's DirectWrite text fuzzier, but not chopped off.

fallenspec 5y ago

I had listened to an interview with the original cleartype author on a podcast almost a decade ago now. IIRC He said that when Apple got the cleartype patent (due to the Apple/Microsoft cross patent agreement that happened in the late 90s), they kinda messed up the implementation of cleartype and Windows actually implements it correctly and Mac OS X (now Mac OS) doesn't. So I find this somewhat amusing.

seltzered_ 5y ago
You might be thinking of the interview with the late Bill Hill (2011), co-creator of ClearType : https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-5-typo https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-5-typo

yepthatsreality 5y ago

I don’t use Windows anymore (Pop_os and FreeBSD) but never had an issue with how the fonts rendered. The site doesn’t seem to indicate anymore information either.

blehn 5y ago
Windows biases for a sharper text appearance, whereas Mac is much smoother. I can see why some folks prefer the sharp look, but fonts on Windows often look nothing like what the designer intended. Mac is a lot more true to the font design.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Honestly, I prefer the Windows sharpness much to the aesthetic and font design that the author of the font wants. Fonts are a nice for styling a document or website, but in the end the text is designed to be read, not to be art. If the designer only tested on macOS, I don't think this has anything to do with what the designer "intended". It just shows a lack of testing on other platforms, something that happens quite often (i.e. when dealing with scrollbars [1]). Personally, I dislike the vague, blurry rendering macOS uses. Macs usually compensate for their weird, blurry, bold rendering with high-resolution screens, but on lower resolutions I really dislike the way fonts look on macOS. [1]: https://svenkadak.com/blog/scrollbar-blindness https://svenkadak.com/blog/scrollbar-blindness

didibus 5y ago

I just switched from Windows to a Mac, and I immediately found that the colors and contrast and the clarity of images and text on the same monitor I connect my laptop too improved. I wasn't sure if it was just in my head, but something about the rendering in Mac seems better to me. I don't know if they have better calibration for colors and contrast, better anti-aliasing, etc., but I seem to see the screen much better and my eyes don't strain as much.

Joeri 5y ago
Have you tried to use the windows ClearType Text Tuner to improve the font rendering? Windows tries to take advantage of subpixels to improve crispness but it can cause color fringing which makes text harder to read. The tuner utility helps with that. You can also disable cleartype entirely to get standard anti-aliasing, which is what macOS does on non-retina screens. Personally I find the macOS way of rendering on standard dpi displays a bit too blurry. As for images, the only difference I can imagine is a different handling of color profiles. Update: I totally forgot about the mixed dpi situation. When you hook up a monitor of a different dpi than the laptop (e.g. the laptop is 150% scaling but the monitor is 100%, or vice versa), then only one display will be perfectly crisp for all apps, and that's the primary display at login. Only applications designed to take advantage of the right scaling API's will look crisp on both displays in that case. The other ones will look blurry on the non-primary display. MacOS does tend to handle that situation a little bit better.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  The text drawn in most places doesn't match the cleartype tuner (try choosing the most grayscale option each time), and the cleartype in general doesn't take into account screen rotation. Turning off cleartype leaves you with text with odd per-pixel kerning.
- vborovikov 5y ago
  There is a fix for apps that are blurry on the non-primary low-res display. Go to the app properties and on the Compatibility tab click the button 'Change high DPI setting' and check 'Override high DPI scaling behavior' option. Make sure 'Application' is selected in the 'Scaling performed by:' drop-down list. The blurry apps will render a bit bigger on the non-primary low-res display but everything will be crisp.

crazygringo 5y ago

It's bizarre that neither the README nor the associated minimal site explains what it does in detail, with screenshots or anything. I'm assuming this is a modern version of GDI++, which a decade ago brought Mac-style font rendering to Windows, but stopped being maintained a while ago. For people who aren't aware of the difference, it's essentially that Windows uses heavy font hinting to try to align character strokes with pixel boundaries which produces sharper letterforms at the cost of distortion of the aesthetic personality of the font, while Mac antialiases more to faithfully maintain the accurate letterforms of a typeface, at the cost of being blurrier. It's basically the tabs-vs-spaces debate of font rendering. Nobody's "right", it's just personal preference. Fortunately, high-resolution "retina" style displays make the distinction much less important, in the same way that it's entirely irrelevant in high-resolution printing.

krona 5y ago
I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing. Prior to very high pixel density screens, I hated the Mac/android font rendering, mostly due to the migraines caused by my eyes straining to correct for the seemly out-of-focus text blur.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  >I always thought the biggest difference was subpixel vs grayscale anti-aliasing. It's mostly hinting. Windows actually doesn't do subpixel antialiasing in many applications anymore. (such as Start menu or new Settings panel)
  - danybittel 5y ago
    Of course it does.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago

jbverschoor 5y ago

I've disabled any subpixel rendering a long time ago. It's annoying, and makes the text look weird. It's not needed for hidpi screens. Ancient tech

pityJuke 5y ago

MacType works nice on the surface, but using it feels like a bit of a minefield, because if it interacts incorrectly with one of your programs, it can be an annoyance, and because you've gotten used to the font rendering, you might not immediately realize. When playing Riot's VALORANT, it caused massive lag spikes - and that was before I started worrying about the anticheat.

cshokie 5y ago
Indeed. It seems to inject code into every process on the system. That increases the risk to the system more than any typical standalone program.
fleaaaa 5y ago
You can unload dll in the settings.json
- chawyehsu 5y ago
  Perhaps it was a typo, but actually one can unload dll in the .ini config file.
  - fleaaaa 5y ago
    Yup thanks, my brain farted!
errantspark 5y ago
While MacType's delivery method is wild, Valorant anti-hack is a problem, and normalizing that sort of thing is also a problem. Riot games is a bunch of arrogant cowboys who think they know better than everyone else, yet somehow other folks have managed to make anti hack systems that are just as effective and much less intrusive.

jasperry 5y ago

I'm glad this is still being developed. I tried it out around the time Windows 8/10 came out, because to my taste the Cleartype settings were much worse than in Windows 7. However, MacType didn't help with Metro programs, or with Word 2013, in which Microsoft switched to a non-subpixel renderer for the document and made everything a jagged mess. What were they thinking? As another commenter said, moving toward higher DPI makes this less necessary. But I'm still bitter over the years of ugliness I had to suffer through after having such nice Cleartype rendering in Windows XP and 7.

keb_ 5y ago

Call me nuts, but I enjoy font-rendering on my Windows machines even compared to my Ubuntu laptop. I legitimately find them sharper and easier to read.

DamnInteresting 5y ago
Same here. My primary work machines have all been Macs for years now, I find Mac to be a far better environment than Windows in most respects. The two main exceptions are gaming and font rendering, both of which Windows seems to do much better.

tambourine_man 5y ago

One of the reasons I avoided Windows all these years. It seems a little brittle though. Messing with font rendering is such a basic OS feature. I wonder if it could ever be made robust without the help from the oficial vendor.

syspec 5y ago

Any before / after screenshots? I really don't understand when someone makes a project such as this (which seems to have been around for a while), and does not include at least 1 screenshot

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
Yeah, I thought this was a library for app developers to build on, like Skia. But people are saying it's meant to inject code into existing processes. The heck is it?
chawyehsu 5y ago
There are screenshots in issue [0] shared by users. My MacType profile repo [1] also has screenshots for comparison. You might see differences between screenshots because MacType works with a profile containing customizable configurations which can tweak font rendering behaviors as per demands (and I think this is why the README does not include screenshots). [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/557 [1] https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots https://github.com/chawyehsu/mactype-profile#screenshots
c-c-c-c-c 5y ago
Here are some good comparisons. Pity that its not easier to find, been using it for 4 days now and really enjoying it. https://imgur.com/a/mJWl5 https://imgur.com/a/mJWl5

behnamoh 5y ago

I've been using this for a while and am quite happy with the results. Although, I had to create my own customized profile for the best results. The effect is esp. obvious when working on Word documents. Somehow fonts are not rendered "thick" enough in Word, and this app takes care of that. Honestly, I wish MS would do something about blurred fonts in some of the not-so-old programs. Some parts of the Windows OS itself are not rendered correctly!!

lxe 5y ago

I do not prefer this type of font smoothing. In fact I think that windows does a better job at it at certain 4k scaling than Mac does.

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

WindowsType: Better Font Render for Mac

artemiszx 5y ago

A bit of context: this software is popular in China for tweaking Windows font rendering of CJK text (the author is also Chinese language-speaking). Hence the project is only fully localized in Chinese & English, and that the README is fairly simple because most people searching for it already know what it is for.

mastazi 5y ago

I use both Windows and Mac daily and I'm not sure that Mac font rendering is always better. Here is my experience: On low DPI screens (think 24" or 25" at 1080p) I prefer how fonts render in Windows. It seems they have better antialiasing, while Mac fonts look slightly pixelated. However on high DPI screens (13" Retina, 25" 4K etc.) fonts on Mac look sharper while Windows fonts look a bit "soft". So I prefer Mac on those.

simondotau 5y ago
I agree that macOS does the better job on high DPI "retina" screens. On low DPI screens I also prefer how certain fonts render in Windows, specifically, only with fonts that have excellent hinting. Verdana and Georgia look great in low resolution on Windows, but non-standard fonts tend to look like garbage. Putting this in table form: | System fonts | Other fonts | |--------------|--------------| low DPI | Windows | macOS | high DPI | macOS | macOS |
- mastazi 5y ago
  interesting point, initially I did not consider the fact that some fonts might render better than others. Also, I'm a big fan of the Whirlpool forums ;-) (I've noticed "dotau" in your username so I had a look at your profile).

bruhsfx2 5y ago

Good to see MacType discussed here. This tool is more important in Chinese/Japanese/Korean environment as CJK glyphs have more strokes per character as compared to Latin languages. Windows's font rendering tends to fit glyph strokes into pixels (tint). On a low DPI settings (<100), fonts on Windows look more sharp and clear, while on macOS, which discards the bitmaps altogether, the result is blurry (albeit I still prefer to be able to appreciate the original design). On a higher DPI settings (>130), IMO under normal font sizes (>=10pt) the font has enough pixel realestate to behave like what it was designed. The antialiasing could do its job without relying the heavily hinted result. Here are some comparisons. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhoCr9GUYAAjzMG?format=webp https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhoCr9GUYAAjzMG?format=webp Left: AppleWin (Safari for Windows) | Right: Chromium | 12px PingFang SC on 200% system scale As you can clearly see, Apple's font rendering makes every glyph clear enough while ensuring every stroke has the same weight, while Chromium, relying on Windows's font rendering makes the font jagged (stroke width varies), baseline not level (遵守 on the 3rd last line, component 辶's bottom is way up) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJUJZL8UYAAC7sC?format=webp&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJUJZL8UYAAC7sC?format=webp&name... Left: AppleWin | Right: Chromium | 15px MS Gothic on 200% system scale MS Gothic has a very large character design, but on the first line of paragraph, 口 from "口周辺" is not reaching the the height it supposed to do, because of Window's approach of fitting that stroke into a line of pixels. And Windows makes the font thinner. This approach apparently ruined every diagonal strokes like 丿 and 丶, making those strokes even fainter. I have another example of Microsoft Yahei font being drastically better on 200% with MacType but I couldn't find it at the moment. It's suffice to say that MacType will recovered the font rendering for Windows in 200% scale. However, in 100% scale, it provides fixes when Windows messed up with fonts in some cases when it purposefully fit the strokes into pixels. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStIiU0AA01uT?format=webp&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStIiU0AA01uT?format=webp&name... Safari for Windows, 100% scale https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStMyV4AE_b6f?format=webp&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrJStMyV4AE_b6f?format=webp&name... Vivaldi, 100% scale Font rendered on Vivaldi is thin, not equal stroke width, with jagged curves. It's miles better on Safari on Windows. Just look at the "产品" on the bottom left, Windows makes the upper 口 in the 品 painfully short in height. While i appreciate Windows's effort to make glyphs more legible for lower pixel density displays, but at least provide a toggle to turn it off as it literally ruins everything else. Fonts MS used in every Office/Windows/even Windows Terminal showcase video are not hinted font yet the glyphs look pretty legible, and even gorgeous (if you appreciate the curves of Segeo UI) in a 4:2:0 subsampled video, animated, yet average Windows users can't find a way to experience this on daily basis without MacType.

bluedino 5y ago

Linux is another story. Debian looks different from Ubuntu which looks different than vanilla RHEL

uranusjr 5y ago

Didn’t see it mentioned yet, so I’m going to drop the link. Joel Spolsky did a very good writeup in 2007 (back when Apple released Safari for Windows) on the different font rendering strategies Mac and Windows take. MacType is, fundamentally, an attempt to implement Mac’s font rendering algorithm on Windows. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-anti-aliasing-and-sub-pixel-rendering/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...

remix2000 5y ago

The best font rendering I’ve ever seen was on a ChromeOS sdpi (1360x600) netbook. I wish I’d known how to achieve that kind of rendering on an ordinary Linux computer…

chawyehsu 5y ago

Glad MacType is still being developed, it's been a software existing for over a decade. And it has been with me for 8 years so far.

thom 5y ago

Does anybody know of any studies comparing reading performance (speed/comprehension) of various font technologies on different platforms?