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Lately I've been doing a lot of reading of mixed-language sites. I was just recently taking a quiz in Japanese on a website and I found that the fonts were absolutely and completely unreadable. I use both a Mac and a PC, and also use both in one (Mac w/Parallels). What I've discovered is that ClearType, the technology that goes (apparently) beyond anti-aliasing and uses colored pixels to fill in the pixel grid to make regular text fonts appear much crisper. And in truth, there have been a few times when I've been looking at regular text on the Vista machine (using a regular-DPI 20" monitor) when I've thought that the font just looked much cleaner on Vista.
That said, when I look at Japanese on the Mac compared to when I look at it on Vista, its like night and day. The Japanese font that you see when you type, and that shows up when no font has been specified on a web page (e.g. they're just dumping unicode characters, like people posting in Japanese on a forum) is extremely ugly. The stroke thickness is too thin, lines are broken in the wrong place (which makes it nearly impossible to read / interpet Kanji)... it's just sad. There's a certain website with forums that I simply cannot read on a PC, I have to use the Mac to look at the web page.
I know that there are those of you who know what you're talking about and you'll tell me to go to Internet Explorer, on the General tab, click Fonts, and then pick a font for Japanese language unicode text. The problem is, the best looking font for Vista is Meiryo, which is rumored to be a ClearType-enabled font - but that font is unavailable for "plain text". This means that when I am typing several paragraphs of Japanese on the PC, I'm still suck with the crap fonts.
Note: Meiryo, the clear-type enabled font, is not set as the default for Windows Vista. You have to go pick it manually, and it's not in a very obvious location.
If anybody knows of a way to get a better "plain text" font on Vista so that I can actually see what I'm typing, I would love to hear it. I've also heard from other people who type in other languages that Vista is equally un-optimized for their double-byte language input as well.
Moral of the story is : if you're doing multi-lingual stuff in Vista with Unicode languages, you might get lucky and be able to view content in a good font, but it seems like you're still S.O.L. when typing in plaintext input areas (like web forms).
