The Technology of Text

July 16th, 2007 · 3 Comments · Technology

The May 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum includes “The Technology of Text,” fascinating article about the art and science of typography and supporting display technologies such as Microsoft’s ClearType.

While a quick Google of “cleartype vista” indicates that there is no universal warmth to Windows Vista’s ClearType support, I enjoy reading text in Vista more than I do in XP–even with the tuner powertoy for the down-level OS. I’d like to better understand Vista’s integration with ClearType in more detail; so, if you have a good link to share, thanks in advance.

This improved user experience around text and much-improved power management (i.e. extended battery life) have given my work laptop an unexpected boost in usability. There are still a set of issues that prevent me from recommending Vista generally to folks, and I’m hoping that SP1 later this year will address these completely. (I can always hope, right. )

Tags:

3 responses so far ↓

1 alexandra // Jul 17, 2007 at 2:52 am

Interesting. As a Mac-person I could not help Googling a little about this and found out that there is an existing dispute whether Microsofts or Apple/Adobe approach is the best one. It turns out that there is no one single best way, just different approaches.

Read more:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html

http://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/L311277A_FontTT_v4.pdf
2 Craig Randall // Jul 17, 2007 at 8:09 am

Thanks, Alexandra, for the links. I already enjoy Jeff Atwood’s blog; so the “Coding Horror” post was a good refresher. Cheers…
3 alexandra // Jul 17, 2007 at 3:28 pm

Good I forgot to write that nowadays even people running differences can check out these different approaches to font rendering by comparing Safari for Windows and IE for Windows side-by-side.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

PS. It is still a beta so it might be a little rough on its edges DS.