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windows type: the failure of cleartype

Posted on Sunday, 14th July, 2013 by martin

I’ve been playing around with the Windows beta release of Accordance recently. The one thing that struck me almost instantly was just how poor the Hebrew looked in Windows compared to the Mac. I tried reconfiguring ClearType to improve the appearance, but to no avail. Displaying Hebrew at anything smaller than 27 point looked a mess.

Fortunately, I discovered a solution: MacType. This replaces ClearType with font rendering similar to that found on the Mac and a number of Linux distros. Here is the result:

MacType vs. ClearType
MacType vs. ClearType

(Click the image to see the full size version.) The left half is ClearType, the right half is MacType, both are 24 point. Judge for yourself the results. The results are even more dramatic at 18 point.

There are a few typefaces which seem to work well with ClearType, but in my opinion most look better with MacType.

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