Typography: A conparison of Windows and Mac OS X (and linux)

As this year has progressed I have learned much about writing. Because we live in the world of computers I have learned much about the presentation of writing. In essence I have learned about typography.

Now really, typography is much more than just how the words look as a whole, but rather about the characters themselves. However I don't really intend to go into the character part of this art.

Typography as defined by Merriam-Webster:

ty·pog·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \tī-ˈpä-grə-fē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Medieval Latin typographia, from Greek typos impression, cast + -graphia -graphy
Date: 1610

1: letterpress printing
2: the style, arrangement, or appearance of typeset matter

Fist let me show you example of some text:


These simple glyphs are very fundamental in the appearance of a text publication. They are heavily supported by OpenType (which has a ton of other great features). OpenType was developed by Adobe and Microsoft. However none of the features that OpenType supports are supported in any Microsoft product. So when a person pays to have a well developed word processing program (for a simple non-designer, or a cheap person) they don't get features the the company helped develop. Odd, isn't it? On the other you you can pay Adobe $699 for complex design program and that has a steep learning curve and no one, except a designer, would need InDesign.

For someone who doesn't have money but wants their papers to look good, this causes a problem. Use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org (developed by Sun, open source, free),or some other generic word processing program; Save up and buy the program; or do the illegal and pirate the program (which is stupid).

Oh and there's TeX but that's a bitch to learn the coding and difficult to change the font from the default. The default looks like an old math textbook.

And that gets sort of annoying.