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   josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:12:12 JST josef

   kinda crazy that for at least 15 years, websites look better on a mac, because everybody who designs websites uses a mac. like, look at web fonts. we've been embedding custom fonts into websites for like 10+ years at this point and most of them still look too thin on windows and linux, and nobody's fixed it because the only people who would care about that kind of thing have a mac so they don't notice. imo someone either needs to fix the fonts or change the font rendering code or something

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     josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:12:13 JST josef

     in reply to

     • Renalia

     @Nine i don't really know the answer! i heard somewhere once that the whole mac OS X graphics stack was kind of based on postscript, which was why PDF rendering was easier and/or built-in and/or looked better on macs, but i have no idea if any of this is true! i'm pretty sure that apple was one of the first adopters of the technology, maybe they licensed it from adobe and the license was exclusive or really expensive or nobody else cared enough to want to license it

     clacke likes this.
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     Renalia (nine@chitter.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:12:14 JST Renalia

     in reply to

     @jk i notice you have not answered my question.

     ...

     this is concerning, but very on brand for you. wlel done

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     josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:12:15 JST josef

     in reply to

     like. you open some website on windows. or linux. and you can tell someone's really put a lot of effort into making it look ""nice"", using print fonts that would look great with the mac-style heavy, less-sharp but more-accurate font rendering, but with the windows/default linux style crisp-pixel style hinting it just looks kinda cruddy. all these fonts that were clearly designed with some kind of ink expansion effect being rendered in a weird, anemic way. and nobody even talks about it!

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     Renalia (nine@chitter.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:12:15 JST Renalia

     in reply to

     @jk was PostScript like, strictly a mac thing originally or did i just imagine that?? cause like, wasn't that the thing whereby you had fonts actually on the PRINTER and the PostScript fonts you got on computer were effectively approximations so you could see what it would kinda look like, but your printer had to have the fonts actually installed on it too?

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     josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:16 JST josef

     in reply to

     • kepstin

     @kepstin when i mention the 'renderer' or whatever, i mean whatever series of decisions and implementation details end up creating a character on the screen. if there's code somewhere that can make really nice-looking text, it doesn't matter at all in practice, since nobody's configuring it properly! whatever system, technical or social, is at fault, that's the system i'm talking about

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     josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:16 JST josef

     in reply to

     • kepstin

     @kepstin i bet the 25 typography people who are keeping the open source font rendering stacks going are putting in some great features, but there are another 8,000 people writing all sorts of other code and who cannot notice a difference ensuring all those code paths remain unvisited

     clacke likes this.
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     josef (jk@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:17 JST josef

     in reply to

     difficult to communicate in this post that i'm not saying windows or mac or linux have better or worse font rendering necessarily, just that most of the people who are good at designing fonts use macs, and as those render fonts differently, everybody else is getting a slightly worse-looking result

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     kepstin (kepstin@glitch.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:17 JST kepstin

     in reply to

     @jk the main advantage macs have right now is that they almost universally have high-resolution "retina" displays; having more pixels makes fonts look better regardless of the rendering tech used.

     Honestly, the font renderer used on linux (freetype2) *is* really good; it's just that very few applications use it correctly. Basically nothing does gamma-correct rendering. GTK only recently started doing sub-pixel glyph positioning. At least most folks do use slight or no hinting now.