OSX font alternatives

Everybody here knows that Lucida Grande (by Bigelow&Holmes) is the default system font in Mac OS X. Looking through Apple Human Interface Guidelines you won't find any other font. So why we should use "unofficial" Lucida MAC or MacGrande?

I've made a short analysis about this stuff and found out something interesting:

OSX is quite similar to Linux. So I opened KDE and payed attention to the font smoothing options. The result was amazing: manipulating these settings you can achieve 90% similarity even with different fonts
Windows XP is offering only 2 options of the font smoothing. None of them is appropriate. Lets do not fool ourselves: ClearType is really for TFT. Most of such displays still use 262k palettes and dithering. In both OSX and XP font colour is black (#000000). Take a closer look OSX adds some grey, but XP adds so many strange tones like orange (#E3AA67) and green (#ADE7AD)
Few days ago I printed a document (containing Lucida Grande font) with Bubble-jet printer in fast mode. I compared the result with my dispay: symbols more than 13pt looked like Lucida MAC

Lucida Grande provided with Iceman Themes contains lots of non-latin symbols.

Non-English speaking users everytime get troubles with lack of language symbols because Lucida MAC simply doesn't have anything except Latin. And after smoothing and blending letters look crappy.

Being one of these users I did my best to found an alternative to use with M$ ClearType.

(click to see the complete image)

Lucida typeface is very compatible with Frutiger. Take a closer look to small "a" and "J". Frutiger is available in many languages. For example, Cyrillic version is called FreeSet (by Paratype).

What do you think about? Do you have your own alternatives?

#308587

interesting!

#308596

The two images you have (one with Windows XP ClearType and one with Mac OS X rendering) represent two different types of font rendering, both achievable on both OSes. The first image (where you see those odd colours) refer to subpixel rendering, which is also available on Mac OS X. The second image (as displayed on a Mac) uses grayscale rendering, which is also achievable on Windows XP (by turning on "Standard", instead of "ClearType") rendering. That's what I've been using and it's given me better results than ClearType IMO. There are just two things you need to know before using grayscale rendering on Windows XP:

1. The font must have a GASP table activated at all font sizes (using a font editor or a simple tool such as TTFGASP).

2. For some odd reason, most fonts appear too blurred/faded under Windows' grayscale renderer to be used, so you must thicken the font with a font editor. You only get this problem on WinXP, works fine without any modding under Linux (and presumably OS X).

Finally, you're right, Lucida Grande only has Latin characters, which is a pain if you needed additional language support. To circumvent this you can either:

1. Merge Lucida Grande with another font containing glyths for your language of choice.

2. Link multiple "fallback" fonts through the Windows registry via FontLink

HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionFontLinkSystemLink

Well, that's as much as you can do in Windows I think. The font render sucks no matter what you do and we can only hope that Windows Vista has better font rendering technology.

#308612

I've just tried TTFGASP but no result. The smoothing still begins from 14pt.

And I meant that Lucida MAC doesn't have additional characters. Lucida Grande which I have is almost complete for additional languages - just fine for me

Is there much difference between TrueType fonts (TTF) and Type1 (AFM+AFB, PFM+PFB). What is the best for not-blurry look?

#308816

I believe Type1 fonts have more features than TrueType, but ultimately the "non-blurriness" is really in how the font is made and also the font renderer. So to keep it short, yeah...probably Type1 is better but not necessarily so. For example, Lucida Grande on OS X is TTF and that isn't blurry at all because of the font renderer used in the OS. Finally, I think something messed up in the process when you were using TTFGASP. Did you use TTFGASP on a TTF font? If so, did you uninstall the old font and install the new one after? Because I've been using smoothed-out greyscale versions of HandelGotD for ages and it works great.

#308954

Yes, I used TTFGASP on a TTF font: copied from the fonts folder and typed

TTFGASP "Lucida Grande.ttf"

. File size was changed, I did logout and entered as Admin (because there was default luna theme and Lucida was not in use) and replaced the files. After that Lucida Grande is still not smoothing below 14pt with XP default smoothing... weird...

There is an interesting feature (currently discussed in Object Bar thread): a DWORD

HKCUControl PanelDesktopFontSmoothingGamma

I created this key and tried different values, but the only I get is the increasing of distance between memu items. If I set it to 512 (decimal) then menu item distance becomes large, but window tabs become more compact (looks nice, except menus) - what a strange setting!

And may be there are some secret registry tweaks (missing or disabled by default at M$)?

#309175

Good tip, I'm going to give it a try. Also, does this registry key apply to all font smoothing methods or only ClearType? BTW, after you installed the new TTF font, you did switch font rendering to "Standard" and restarted your computer right?

#309216

of course I did it - no result

#309483

The two images you have (one with Windows XP ClearType and one with Mac OS X rendering) represent two different types of font rendering, both achievable on both OSes. The first image (where you see those odd colours) refer to subpixel rendering, which is also available on Mac OS X. The second image (as displayed on a Mac) uses grayscale rendering, which is also achievable on Windows XP (by turning on "Standard", instead of "ClearType") rendering. That's what I've been using and it's given me better results than ClearType IMO. There are just two things you need to know before using grayscale rendering on Windows XP:
1. The font must have a GASP table activated at all font sizes (using a font editor or a simple tool such as TTFGASP).
2. For some odd reason, most fonts appear too blurred/faded under Windows' grayscale renderer to be used, so you must thicken the font with a font editor. You only get this problem on WinXP, works fine without any modding under Linux (and presumably OS X).
Finally, you're right, Lucida Grande only has Latin characters, which is a pain if you needed additional language support. To circumvent this you can either:
1. Merge Lucida Grande with another font containing glyths for your language of choice.
2. Link multiple "fallback" fonts through the Windows registry via FontLink
HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionFontLinkSystemLink
Well, that's as much as you can do in Windows I think. The font render sucks no matter what you do and we can only hope that Windows Vista has better font rendering technology.

Thanks for the tips. I tried the Standard renderer under XP and it seems to produce 'better' results than ClearType

#309528

The font rendering engine for Linux is called FreeType, and there is a version available for Win32, from 98 all the way to XP.

FreeType is the closest thing you'll get to Mac font rendering on a PC. I personally haven't used the Win32 version as I use linux, but I do install the latest version manually after doing a fresh install of my OS.

Here's the links for FreeType info and downloads.

FreeType Project

FreeType for Windows

#310241