Typophile - Mac rendering on Windows - Comments

It’s interesting the three

guifa — Wed, 8 Aug 2007 16:48:19 -0700

It’s interesting the three apps you noted. Word, Pages, and TextEdit all use different engines. Pages and TextEdit’s are related, but I’ve found subtle difference in mark-positioning for instance between the two when I needed to have a tilde over a lower-case q (a common Spanish abbreviation back in the day). TextEdit can do it perfectly. Pages is unable to, and places the tilde to the right of the q (although if I place an a in between the q and ~, it combines the a with the tilde. You can also select the tilde and a independently, kind of cool).

I’m not sure that that’s so much of an error as a warning. To my knowledge, there is no standard way to encode glyph variants in documents in any of the go-between formats, eg, if I have a UTF-8 encoded plain text document, I can’t actually define a glyph variant. Some programs don’t support them, so even if there were a way, they of course wouldn’t be able to display it.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Hi there: Matthew thanks for

SuperUltraFabulous — Wed, 8 Aug 2007 13:23:46 -0700

Hi there:

Matthew thanks for posting the scoop on the upcoming architectural changes to Leopard. As it stands right now there is some OpenType support but it is definitely incomplete. For some people, OS level support for the complete OpenType spec is irrelevant due to the fact that these same people use Adobe/Quark products which provide the total access to these features.

It would be a good thing if Apple was to finish the work they started with OpenType in the upcoming Leopard so people using apps MS Word, Pages, or even TextEdit can have full access to all of OpenType’s goodies.

Mike Diaz :-)

PS... My favorite error message in the world...

I haven’t seen it brought

guifa — Tue, 7 Aug 2007 23:57:23 -0700

I haven’t seen it brought up at all here (as in typophile), although it was recently mentioned to me by a coworker.

Leopard will be including a new text-engine, although I’m not sure if it’s a rendering engine, or a overhaul of old code and possibly supporting more OT features. ATSUI will be replaced by CoreText. I didn’t go to WWDC, and so I’m not sure what exactly was discussed. There is a mailing list, I might join it if it’s open. In any case, since ATSUI functioned on both OS 8.5 and OS X, but with greatly different rasterisation techniques, it might be limited to offering better frameworks for normal application developers to access type features and perhaps also expand OpenType support on the Mac.

Of course we’ll have to wait until it’s released to know since anyone who has a copy of Leopard is under NDA :(

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

“Mac your choice”

typovar — Tue, 7 Aug 2007 16:24:12 -0700

“Mac your choice”

I suppose one of the things

Daniel Denk — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:56:28 -0700

I suppose one of the things that I’ll express as a potential caveat to your analysis - is in that I sense you’re assuming the future of computing is on the desktop.

With a continued penetration of 50% of all households in the US alone having a desktop in the home, I don’t find those demographics encouraging toward development. But the mobile and wireless market poses an interesting occurrence — having potential to break penetration once the paradigm shift occurs — allowing the possibilities for concentration of type technologies being placed toward the newer paradigm. That’s where we could see the most development impact moving forward, as the smaller realestate foot-print poses critical challenges in type rendering for both functionality and the aesthetic.

(No one really wants a mobile device that makes their eyes bleed.)

“Is Lucida Grande the

Daniel Denk — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:42:27 -0700

“Is Lucida Grande the showcase font?”

Have you tried cross-referencing with Geneva?

k.l., “As to the advice to

jasonc — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:23:06 -0700

k.l., “As to the advice to better test the ClearType rasterizer with ClearType fonts … that would make a strange ‘comparison’, wouldn’t it? ;-)”
I know it sounds like a strange idea, but that’s because the CT fonts have less restrictive TT instructions in them. The point is that to evaluate optimal results, use fonts designed to give optimal results for each rasterizer. But because of the way tha Mac OS works, it doesn’t much matter which font you use, there’s no such thing as optimal tuning for the Mac.
It’s true that if you instead wanted to test pure results, not optimized results, you should use fonts with no TT instructions.

From a technical perspective, the Mac solution is really the problem. We’ve got different TrueType font engines here, but the Win rasterizer scales and renders type as one would expect from reading the TT (OT) specs, while the Mac rasterizer follows most of the TT (OT) specs, but virtually ignores a fairly critical section of the spec (Hint Instructions.)
I don’t want to dredge up the old fight about whether the TT hint instruction set was a good idea (for the 12 or so of us who care ;), but technically, the Win engine follows the specs more closely, and is truer to a font developer’s intentions, than the Mac engine.

However that whole idea doesn’t affect the real quality of display type. Shifts in hardware technology, and sociological changes in the way we read and process text over the last 10 years have really changed what the “optimal” way to render text is.

I’ve gotten off topic here, but my real comment on the Verdana problems is that the TT instructions in the font were designed to specifically work in a 2-bit, black and white rendering mode. They suffer more than many other faces in some greyscale rendering situations.

Jason C

Jason C — but I’d like

k.l. — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:43:07 -0700

Jason C — but I’d like to point out that Randy’s problem with the PC screenshots he’s provided are due to the TrueType Instructions in the Verdana font, not with ClearType as a rendering system. [...] This all boils down to the advice that Simon and hrant gave; for a better comparison, use the Cleartype fonts.

The comparison screenshots are valuable since they exhibit the rasterizers’ different philosophies. Maybe the comparisons could be more systematic as regards the choice of both fonts and rasterizers: test Apple system fonts, older heavily hinted MS system fonts, ClearType fonts, each of them in all environments, OSX, WinXP, Vista.

As to the advice to better test the ClearType rasterizer with ClearType fonts ... that would make a strange ’comparison’, wouldn’t it? ;-)

> go with Vista today On my

hrant — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 12:27:38 -0700

> go with Vista today

On my XP, CT is off. :->

hhp

Darrel, I think what we’ve

Randy — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:59:06 -0700

Darrel, I think what we’ve been saying is that MS has been putting a lot of effort in what “might” amount to a bunch of hacks (strong language) depending on your point of view...whilst Apple’s approach anticipates high res displays and features workable rendering now (strong language to some :-).

BTW, Clear type will benefit from higher res displays too. It’s great that they can throw money at it and we can get some nice new typefaces, and for those on the cutting edge of upgrades there are benefits now. So hrant, go with Vista today and you’ll be happy as a clam anti-aliasing Mana by hand for years to come.

Christian, love the bit depth humor.

> 150 ppi with 16 bit color

hrant — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:40:49 -0700

> 150 ppi with 16 bit color can carry more data

And 150ppi with hand-made a-a can actually carry useful data!
As opposed to spending the resolution/depth on blur...

hhp

The frustrating thing about

aluminum — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:07:53 -0700

The frustrating thing about this debate is that it would all be remedied if OSes started rendering with DEVICE INDEPENDANT settings and manufacturers started increasing the resolution of our displays.

Seems like both Apple and MS are putting a lot of effort into what really just amounts to being a bunch of hacks.

Ha! A spread in that book

Christian Robertson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:57:08 -0700

Ha! A spread in that book really is about the same size as most mobile displays. It’s true that 150 ppi is not enough (even my 1200 dpi laser isn’t enough as far as I’m concerned), but ppi isn’t everything. 150 ppi with 16 bit color can carry more data than 150 dpi at 1 bit. This is true of pictures, but it’s also true of type. There really isn’t a correlation to this principle in the print world, since the ink is always there or not, with a maximum of maybe six colors (3bits ;). That being said, I’d rather have a 300dpi screen to read on, for sure.

I haven’t found a TrueType renderer for my Treo 650, but as I understand it, the 700p uses ttfs and sub-pixel rendering. I haven’t looked at it closely, though.

> Higher res displays are

hrant — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:07:28 -0700

> Higher res displays are already here

But what size dude?
http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/tm/images/littlebook.jpg

And when you factor in the distance at which
you’re viewing that screen, 150dpi is not enough.

BTW, can custom TT fonts be loaded into the Treo?

hhp

Higher res displays are

Christian Robertson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:50:54 -0700

Higher res displays are already here, just not on computers. I read books on my treo at 150ppi (I installed at third party antialiasing rasterizer; it’s terrible, but it beats the default bitmaps they have on there). Computer high res will come. It just won’t be driven by the needs of graphics professionals. It will come from crazy graphics processors designed to play games and people who want to watch movies at 4xHighDef on their laptops.

Mac rendering on Windows

sii — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:29:26 -0700

Just installed the Safari Beta on an WinXP machine, not sure if the rendering is exactly the same as Mac OS, but it looks close. I wonder how people will react, at first glance the ice cubes may be a bit furry.