The launch of the Windows version of the Safari web browser has prompted quite a lively debate on the manner in which Apple renders fonts vs the Microsoft way. It isn’t a subtle difference either. Both of the images below were taken off of a Windows PC.

This is the Microsoft rendering, using a screenshot from FireFox 2.0 showing typical plain text from the WordPress dashboard:

And, this is the Apple rendering using a screenshot from Safari 3 Beta showing the same text:

To my eyes, the Apple version looks much better, although I can see why some people complain that it is blurred.

Typography on computer screens has always been a difficult area. When the first desktop publishing systems started to compete with professional optical typesetting equipment there was much lamenting about the loss of the beauty of classic fonts. Early systems treated kerning and litagures with disdain, different size spaces for different contexts disappeared, font scaling lacked hints and fonts looked abysmal as different sizes and WYSIWYG was a joke as on-screen font representation was miles away from the printed output.

Gradually, we have seen computers taking on these points and getting closer and closer to print typography – which has decades of research regarding readability. On screen readability still is a difficult area though, as screen resolutions are still far short of print resolutions. Microsoft font rendering is optimised extremely toward clarity with a focus on aligning features to pixel boundaries. But is clarity the same as readability? I don’t think so. I find the Apple rendering much more natural and more comfortable to read, but am ready to admit the individual characters lack sharpness.

When screens are 300dpi this will become a non-issue, until then it is really a style choice, and I choose Apple.