Mac Font Rendering

August 23rd, 2007

I generally work on a Mac Powerbook and my presentations are in Keynote – I do this because it gets out of my way and lets me create the content without being overburdened by options. Everything also looks gorgeous. When I work in Powerpoint all the fonts looks stark and awful to my eyes.
I had to send this over to someone else so I exported to PP – checked it looked ok and mailed it on. It looked quite good in Mac PP. Then I opened it on my PC notebook – uuurgh. It looks awful. The fonts are horrible.
There’s been a flurry of posts about this recently. In general I agree with the Mac way of doing this though I can see why the Windows people would prefer the crisp Windows fonts.
When it comes to presentations however – where the fonts are 2 feet tall on a wall, the Mac absolutely dominates. I think this is the main reason people go “ooooohhh” when they see a presentation from my Mac even if it’s just a simple title page – everything feels smooth and like a printed page – the Windows PP presentations look stark.
I never knew why it was that I felt this aversion to Windows notebooks after working on a Mac for a few months – this is why. I’ve no doubt the Windows guys have the same aversion.

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