How do you _actually_ get good text with MacType?

[aaronth07]

Despite being names 'Mac'Type, my Mac (and iPad/iOS devices) have far better rendering than MacType. I have tried practically every configuration out there, including editing or outright making my own, nothing comes close to Mac.

I am using a triangular OLED Samsung monitor. I have tried recommended grayscale presets, I have tweaking those presets myself, and I have tried creating my own presets, nothing really looks good. It's either too blurry OR too aliased OR too thick/thin Comparing this again to Mac/iOS/iPadOS, which I know also uses grayscale anti-aliasing, the text is nigh perfect, no blurriness or aliasing whatsoever and with extremely good font weight, and it maintains this near perfect text rendering at all text sizes.

Now, I know that Apple prioritizes PPI in their displays, however, even virtually increasing my PPI through 4x pixel-perfect supersampling (which gives me a simulated PPI that is on-par with most modern Apple displays), while helping massively, still does not provide a satisfactory result.

Understanding that my PPI is relatively low compared to Apple's displays, I have also tried subpixel anti-aliasing rather than grayscale, which if configured correctly (keyword IF), can effectively increase resolution by a factor of three. Unfortunately for non-standard subpixel/pentile layouts (such as triangular RGB or WRGB), your options for subpixel rendering, both within and without MacType, are extremely limited. The entire reason to switch to and set up MacType was because the default Windows options do not work good enough for your display, and yet, MacType doesn't include a single preset for non-standard layouts. In-fact, MacType practically barely supports anything but RGB and BGR, as an example, if you try to edit a non-standard layout within MacType Tuner, it will completely overwrite your existing config. I learned that the hard way.

I am going to end with some comparisons. I am comparing in MacType Tray's about menu, because it's easy to see the difference and fast to switch. In addition, it uses the default font that most GDI programs use, which I am assuming is Segoe UI. Overall, it's a pretty standard configuration. All settings regarding MacType Tray are default (except the ini files). I recommend that you view the screenshots at 100% scale, otherwise, they will use filters to rescale the image and you will not get the native look.

Here is with a popular and recommended config, Deep Gray No Hinting.

I personally think it looks absolutely terrible. It's way too dark and contrasted.

Here is with (I believe) a default preset, Clean Light Grayscale.

This is certainly far better, but there is still that blurriness I mentioned.

I believe this next one is included by default as well, Clean Grayscale V2.0:

Blurry and low contrasted. By the way, none of these presets, even the blurry ones, have completely removed the aliasing. The selected font has a dramatic impact on how aliased the text is, despite practically all information online saying the opposite.

For example, here is a quick switch between Segoe UI and the excellent Inter:

Segoe UI

Inter

Both I would say have bad amounts of aliasing, but from what I have tested, there is no getting rid of some aliasing unfortunately.

Any tips or presets for triangular OLED or grayscale that anyone would like to share?

[snowie2000]

Here is a discussion about profiles for pentile layout panels #720, #932 , and the latest version of mactype comes with built-in profiles for pentile panels. You should try them.

Generally speaking, you should use custom pixellayout to specify RGB(W) layout of your panel so that the subpixel rendering of mactype can suit your monitor.

[ssssssbbb]

Most popular configs are too dark and too thick due to large "RenderWeight" value, some even reached 2.0!! 1.0 ~ 1.1 is recommended, they know nothing. Besides, the "Contrast" value is always too large which leads to aliasing, 1.0 is recommended. And, GammaValue=1.4 is recommended. And , too large shadow value. Correcting the wrongs is the first step.

LCDFilterWeight is the correct parameter to increase darkness without changing font weight. I used LCDFilterWeight=20,50,50,80,80 on both 93ppi and 157ppi displayers and get good text. Unfortunately, this parameter can't work with the pentile parameters. I don't have pentile displayer, but maybe using LCDFilterWeight instead of the pentile parameters worth trying.

[wmjordan]

@aaronth07
I downloaded your screenshot of the About dialog and found that the dialog is displayed in a very small size, about 306*193 approximately.
Maybe you should set the text scale value to 125% or higher value in your Windows system.
With too limited pixels, text can't look good. We can't split a single pixel into three by software.

Here's mine, which looks sharp and clean on my monitor with 125% scaling.