ClearType

[cdd]

I was wondering what other people feel about this technology. Basically, this is the Windows feature that effectively triples the horizontal resolution of text by taking advantage of how LCD screens are made. I used to go through real 'waves' of it. Of course, if you use Vista, it's on and that's the end of it (unless you switch to Windows Classic), and the same for IE7 and Office 2007.

I have found it a lot better under Vista than XP. I think this is partly because XP uses fonts like Tahoma and Arial and so on which are designed for traditional displays, whereas Vista uses a new load of fonts such as Segoe UI and Calibri that lend themselves more to this sort of fun.

Apple have this sort of thing too of course, and I do prefer Apple's cleartype-esque feature for traditional fonts like Times New Roman and Arial - in fact I did briefly wonder if I should use Safari for the PC since it uses this feature.

Anyway, how have you found ClearType?

[marksi]

You can turn it off in IE7.

I liked Safari but refuse to use it because I couldn't turn off "BlurType". Are you saying that you can't turn it off in Windows Vista? I find that hard to believe.

[cdd]

You can turn it off in IE7.

I liked Safari but refuse to use it because I couldn't turn off "BlurType". Are you saying that you can't turn it off in Windows Vista? I find that hard to believe.

Well, yes and no: you can turn it off, but the Aero theme uses the new Segoe and Calibri fonts which somehow have Cleartype built into them. You can get it completely off if you use the Windows Classic theme.

[Nini]

Apple have this sort of thing too of course, and I do prefer Apple's cleartype-esque feature for traditional fonts like Times New Roman and Arial - in fact I did briefly wonder if I should use Safari for the PC since it uses this feature.

It renders just like it does on any Mac which is still something of a huge achievement to get a good amount of CoreGraphics code running natively on Winders. Anyway, I do like ClearType but it's not a patch on how OS X renders it, fuzzy to some but I can actually read text through Safari whereas reading it in FF isn't exactly as clear due to each character looking weedy and poor. IIRC the reasoning for differing rendering was to do with OSX rendering it based on the actual shape of it instead of by pixel multiplying as Windows does with ClearType.