Channel9 met with Bill Hill and the ClearType team again and see what's the latest with the fonts in Windows Vista. They talk about trends in display resolution, research done in aesthetics and quite a few other things.
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Member since:2005-12-19
My point in pixels:
http://xisystems.net/files/fonts.png
Member since:2005-07-06
Uh, sorry ... but the Vera Sans one looks *terrible*. Absolutely hideous. The second one down looks okay, but there's a bit of funniness going on around curves (S's, and the bottom part of lower-case A's). The ClearType wins hands down against all three.
You ARE looking at this on an LCD, right?
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-10-02
I noticed your screenshot did not use subpixelrendering for FT 
The poster clearly has a point, and so do you when you mention Microsoft does a lot of R&D on fonts. They have to, because TT-fonts without a lot of (the right) instructions don't look good at all.
But the fonts Microsoft ships with Windows are really good. Some of them could be better according to my requirements, but I'm also extremely picky when it comes to fonts. Probably a disease stemming from my days studying at the Graphical Line at Technical College in Aarhus.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
You have a good point. I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono on my IRC client and I used it in KDevelop when I was doing development on debian. It's very crisp with ClearType though. But it was probably the only font on Linux that was visually pleasing and rendering amazingly well for me. Every other font had subtle issues.
I still think ClearType is the better rendering engine, but it definitely should be noted that Microsoft does a lot of R&D on fonts to produce very specialized fonts, whereas *nix doesn't seem to have any good fonts made specificaly for it, save the Bitstream family, which is a very awesome font.