Fonts in Pages

I hadn't noticed that Pages' text was burry or indistinct until I put Word and Pages side by side and saw that - on my notebook and desktop - text in Word is black and text in Pages is light black. Text in Word is very crisp and text in Pages is a little less crisp. I played around with text smoothing in the Appearance control panel to make Pages text more crisp but it remained not quite totally black. Still, it is hardly a deal breaker for me.

So have you tried playing with text smoothing?

I noticed that yesterday as well and am undecided if I like it better in Pages.

There was a lot of discussion about a similar issue in the Safari for Windows forum. It seems it very much is a matter of habit. You learn to like one way or the other, or, as in my case, both.

(A second issue in the Safari for Windows forum seemed to be some PC screens, that did not handle Apple's font smoothing well. However, given that you have a Powerbook, that should not be a problem in your case.)

Taste... habit... I found an article about the two concepts:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html?hi=joel

Not that it will make you much wiser, but it at least shows that someone else has found similar differences.

I agree that the Pages rendering of the font is too grey, but I also believe the Word rendering is too bold. In fact it can make it hard to tell bold from plain text.

Microsoft has no compunction in totally distorting the size and true shape of characters to get what many users see as clearer text.

I prefer more accurate rendering, in other words WYSIWYG.

If you really want the font to look larger, make it larger. If you want it bolder, make it bold. Don't confuse the issue to the point you can't tell what's what.

Apple on the other hand needs to address the greyness of its text, that is a problem.

That's a different issue all together. Microsoft's WIndows font rendering is totally different from the font rendering in Mac Word. I think the issue might be carbon vs cocoa applications.

...a little late to the party, but...

I've downloaded the trial version of iWork '08 - mostly for the Pages component. The font rendering of this app really leaves me cold. It's pale and fuzzy - and to my taste, simply no match for Word.

At least in some templates, the specified color of text is a very dark grey which one might mistake for black (I did, initially). However, in these cases the lower contrast between text and background is simply the result of a design decision.