Font Rasterization -- from Maxim

by Miguel de Icaza

Maxim ---of AntiGrain fame--- has written a fantastic analysis of the various text rendering systems used in Windows, MacOS and Linux and proposes some solutions to this problem: Texts Rasterization Exposures -- An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information:

Joel Spolsky in his article "Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering" [1] compares Microsoft and Apple ways of text rendering and explains why windows people don't like Safari. Text in Safari looks too blurry and that must be why. I want to go further and sum up my experience and observations about it. I'm not an expert in digital typography, but I "have something to say". At least, some ideas may be useful for the GNU/Linux community.

Posted on 08 Jul 2007