When I was forced onto a PC this morning, under great duress, I tried to reassure myself with simple thoughts—PC user thoughts. Here was the latest and greatest Microsoft® Windows®, I told myself, the recipient of awards and accolades from the entire PC world, the perfectest operating system ever. How bad could it be?
Then I opened a browser.
Goatse for Mac users (click to zoom)
Feeling faint, I leaned in for a closer look, and choked back vomit at the horror: Windows 7 renders CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) with bitmap glyphs. Not even inline rōmaji (Latin) text is spared the bitmap treatment.
On top of that we have Windows’ apparent inability to adhere to a full-width character grid. This is most obvious at lower left, where a column of prices teeters askelter as if struck by a chair hurled by a monkey in a furious rage.
Here, for comparison, are the same pages rendered on a system designed not by clueless trogs, but by expert developers who respect the art of typography:
Click to zoom
Now, everyone knows that Microsoft is slow to adopt new technologies. But to render text with jaggies—worse, CJK text, the readability of which is improved tremendously by antialiasing—some 34 years after Apple invented subpixel rendering? Appalling even by Microsoft’s standards.
Assuming Windows 7 is even capable of rendering CJK decently on a fresh install, why does it remain halfway illegible in these everyday examples? Does Windows make you tweak the registry or find extra font packs just to lift its display typesetting to bare mediocrity?
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The problem is the website not specifying a font, not Microsoft. Firefox, Chrome, and IE all specify an old font that is meant for maximum compatibility (looks like MS Gothic in your case). Most websites specify a different font so that it does not rely on the default, but the website you posted did not.
Windows comes with a bunch of great fonts, and can render CJK just as well as a Mac or Linux. If the website had specified the font, it would have showed up fine.
So the reason Windows 7 sucks is for compatibility with previous versions of Windows that also sucked. Thus, IE will default to a bitmap font with broken spacing, forever. Got it.
Actually, Firefox and Chrome do THE EXACT same thing.
Not on the Mac.
That’s a silly argument because the Mac doesn’t have that font to begin with. The Mac also isn’t backwards compatible with prior versions, which is one of the many reasons why Macs are almost completely non-existent in the corporation.
My original point still stands though – the website designers should have defined a font instead of going with the default. Firefox and Chrome developers should have also defined a better default, but for whatever reason went with the same old font that IE uses.
What’s the backwards compatibility being preserved here? The snaggle-toothed character grid?
I don’t think you understand. The default fonts are set for maximum compatibility. This means that they should be viewable on any type of screen, and printable on any type of printer (including dot matrix, which are still used in certain corporate/industrial environments). Try printing a 10pt true type Kanji character on a dot matrix or ultra high speed printer (i.e. dye based) – it is literally unreadable. Similar on a monochrome monitor.
Any designer who does not specify a font family in their site designs doesn’t know what they’re doing. You are trying to find fault with Windows for something that has nothing to do with Windows. The creators of IE, Chrome, and Firefox all made this same decision … your statements of ‘clueless trogs’ is being directed to them as Microsoft.
Windows came standard with a full set of modern Unicode fonts at least as far back as Win2000. I’m sure you’re just trying to troll up some traffic with this post, but an uninformed “Microsoft sucks, Apple RULZ” post is not a great way to start.
You’re telling me Windows’ type rasterization algorithms are ignorant of font hinting, too? Because that would be a terrific rationale for never replacing bitmap fonts with outline versions—certainly not commonly-used fonts like Courier, or MS Sans Serif, or… wait, what?
Holy shit you are a pretentious faggot.
People who leave comments as pretentious as yours are equally pretentious, faggot.
If Macs and iPhones were people, I would embrace their genocide