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Viewing Fonts

Overview

Fonts are files that describe the appearance and style of characters/symbols on your screen. Both Mac OS X and Windows XP come bundled with a wide variety of fonts by default. This section will discuss what font types are supported on each operating system (such as OpenType, TrueType, etc.), as well as how well each handles anti-aliasing/sub-pixel rendering.

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Font Support

Mac OS X

Mac OS X includes the following Roman font faces (accompanying faces, such as bold and italic, are also shown):

Apple also offers 25 additional free fonts these in their iTunes Scripts for Mac OS X:

Windows XP

Windows XP includes the following Roman font faces (accompanying faces, such as bold and italic, are not shown):

The following table shows which font formats are supported on Mac OS X or Windows XP:

Anti-aliasing/Sub-pixel Rendering

Anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering are techniques used to "smooth" on-screen fonts so that they appear more legible. Whereas anti-aliasing involves using shades of grey to create the effect of rounded forms, sub-pixel rendering employs "sub-pixels" of red, blue, and green. Generally, sub-pixel rendering is regarded as superior, although it is usually effective only on a flat-panel display (on CRT displays, it may cause fonts to look "blurry").

Mac OS X

OS X supports anti-aliasing as well as sub-pixel rendering of fonts. Both types of rendering settings are selectable from the Font Smoothing popup menu in System Preferences > Appearance. The "Standard font smoothing (Best for CRT)" setting uses anti-aliasing only. Light, Medium, and Strong include sub-pixel rendering.

There's also an option to turn off smoothing on smaller type to prevent fonts from becoming unreadable on your screen.

Windows XP

XP supports both anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering of fonts. Since XP relies on information within each font for which sizes should use anti-aliasing, users cannot change this setting on a system-wide basis.

Microsoft's implementation of sub-pixel rendering is called ClearType. To turn on ClearType sub-pixel rendering:

1. Right-click on the desktop and select Properties from the menu
2. Go to Appearance > Effects
3. Check the box next to Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts, and then select "ClearType" in the dropdown list

The following chart shows serif and sans-serif fonts displayed in the default web browsers of each operating system (Internet Explorer for XP and Safari for OS X). Each group of fonts is shown with no effects (none), anti-aliasing (standard), and sub-pixel rendering (strong/ClearType). OS X's "strong" font smoothing actually uses both sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing.

The following magnified type examples compare ClearType (sub-pixel rendering), Standard Font Smoothing (anti-aliasing only) and Strong Font Smoothing (anti-aliasing plus sub-pixel rendering):

Here, we can clearly see how colored pixels are used in sub-pixel rendering. Because OS X uses both anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering (strong), the contrast of the edge pixels is reduced in comparison to sub-pixel rendering by itself (ClearType). The visual noise introduced by sub-pixel rendering (referred to as "color fringing") is diminished.

Conclusion

Mac OS X bests Windows XP in these areas. OS X supports more font formats than XP, and also gives the user more control over when font smoothing should be used. OS X also uses anti-aliasing in conjunction with sub-pixel rendering to reduce color fringing.

Mac OS X: 9
Windows XP: 6

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