The sad state of font rendering on Linux
I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts <i>exactly</i> as they&#x27;d appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they&#x27;d appear in print.<p>Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you&#x27;re not wrong that Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters.<p>&gt; This occurs because Apple didn’t dare go near any ClearType patents that Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put everyone else to shame.<p>Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do. This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts.<p>With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype doesn&#x27;t scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a failure.<p>In case anyone doesn&#x27;t believe the claim above, this article (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damieng.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2007&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damieng.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2007&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;font-rendering-philosoph...</a>) goes into it in depth.