Damien Guard

I agree that there's substantial qualitative difference between sub-pixel antialiased text and the plain render. The former takes advantage of greater lateral resolution and perceptual differences between the primary colors. That said, I wouldn't consider the absence of that technique jarring. I intentionally change bright-on-dark text to greyscale antialiasing[1], to counter the halation[2]. All the links to images in the thread and the Reddit post you linked are dead, so I can't see how the text rendered for you. Did you by any chance experience this on a MacBook connected to an external monitor, where you had the system set up to render type better on the built in screen[3]? Your point holds though, they don't optimize for 3rd party hardware. I was a bit quick to jump in, thinking you were referring to the difference between their flavour of sub-pixel antialiasing and Microsoft's ClearType[4].

[1] https://srdjan.si [2] https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/why-dark-mode-isnt-a-ux-panacea-1590226e5ba4 [3] https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/font-smoothing-macos-mojave.mov.gif [4] https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x/

It was a historical distinction between the two OSes, even before Apple went all in on high-DPI.

Basically, macOS uses "ideal" font rendering, meaning that all glyph shapes and overall text size is as if they were rendered with infinite resolution and then quantized using the pixel grid; when you increase font size, the text scales linearly.

Windows, on the other hand, adjusts the shapes by snapping vertical and horizontal lines so that they correspond exactly to rows and columns of pixels. This distorts glyph shapes and spacing, but it makes small text (around 8-10pt) much more readable on low-DPI displays.

(Coincidentally, this seems to be why macOS default UI font has always been a bit larger and thicker than Windows.)

There are some screenshots to compare side by side here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x/

It's not about whether you're actually printing it, the print version is just an accurate reference to the correct shape of how the font is designed.

That shape doesn't necessarily line up on the pixel grid, so you can smush it around to get sharper edges on a computer screen at the expense of changing the shape/size/spacing of the font. Or you can follow the designed shape more correctly at the expense of smearing some stuff across multiple pixels.

There are pros and cons to each, and which one you prefer is where it gets subjective.

Some comparisons and discussion over here: https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x

The Windows text has sharper edges but it looks funny to me in comparison.

I also have a hard time understanding the question, but reading the text, it asks a different question:

“The thing is I'm going to need to display stuff on it so I need character gloves and little graphics and stuff like that. Are there any standard glyphs or libraries for resolutions that small?”

Because of that and the use of ‘one color’, I think/guess the OP has a 80×20 display that isn’t black and white (say a LED panel), and looks for fonts that can be used on it (I would go look at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ or https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts, or look at old Mac and Windows bitmap fonts for those (warning: copyright laws may apply)) and, possibly, libraries to show an UI on it.

The Droid family from Ascender, which Google commissioned for Android is uniformly excellent, renders well everywhere I've seen it and is Apache Licensed. I'm currently using 'Droid Sans' as a system UI font (on Linux) and 'Droid Sans Mono' for coding, terminals, etc... In fact I've just aliased the linux 'sans', 'mono', etc... to the appropriate Droid face.

More info here, including the link to the git repo if you want to check the fonts out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts

these are in the Ubuntu repo's as 'ttf-droid' or you can do a straight download from here:

http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtesy-of-google-ascender

On Windows, requesting a particular font size is just a hope and a prayer. The OS will draw things at the size it thinks is best, with heavy-handed hinting, so the size of a rendered piece of text is quite non-linear with respect to font size: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x

This makes it quite impossible for an application to implement a general solution to the problem. You pretty much have to treat HiDPI as another translation of the GUI with respect to sizing things.