ClearType digression

And amaze your Windows XP friends with LCD displays by enabling ClearType on their computers. It's Windows' best feature (superior to Apple's nameless implementation), and it's not turned on by default. Start -> Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance -> Effects -> method to smooth fonts (checked) -> ClearType. You can make it even better by visiting <http://www.Microsoft.com/typography/> and running the ClearType Tuner utility. Apple needs something similar.

I hate ClearType. First thing I turn off on computers I use. To me it makes all the text look fuzzy and gives me a headache. The Tuner maybe able to adjust it to something I can use, but I find turning it off works just as well.

I do use Font Smoothing on the Mac. Fairly aggressively too (Medium strength, smooth everything 8 pts and greater). It just seems the fonts I use work better with it.

As much as possible I use the free (as in pretty close to open source) Bitstream Vera fonts. I really like the monospaced font for terminal (except for a small problem with the underline character looking like a space on occasion.)

<http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/>

Kevin

> And amaze your Windows XP friends with LCD displays by enabling ClearType on their computers.

Holy #$%^!! I just tried it on my Pee Cee LCD monitor at work. The letters were so blurry I could barely read them.

Yes, it's amazing all right. ;-)

__________________________
Ryoichi "Roy" Morita
Western Farm Service, Inc.

I tried turning on the Clear Type function on my PC (I have an LCD screen) and the letters became quite fuzzy! Back to Standard for me... LOL!

Paul

I tried ClearType briefly on my Windows machine and didn't like the results
very much. I never knew if it was just because I was using it wrong or
something (even though for the past several years, I've been using nothing
but LCD screens), but I never looked into it.

So I decided to take a closer look for myself to see what I don't like about
it. The benchmark, of course, is Mac OS X's own font smoothing, which to my
mind is terrific. Here's a side-by-side comparison of Mac OS X and Windows
XP/ClearType.

http://www.subtraction.com/misc/cleartype_comparison.png

The sample shows Helvetica and Arial at 12px in the body and 18px in the
headline. At the bottom is also a 300% enlargement of a portion of the
Helvetica text, so you can see what's going on at a pixel-level.

I'm no expert on the mechanics of screen typography, but the ClearType
option looks demonstrably poorer than Mac OS X. It just appears more aliased
and less true to the letterforms, though I suppose some can argue that it's
sharper and therefore arguably easier to read. But if you want sharper, why
use font smoothing at all? I say thumbs-down on ClearType.

Khoi

work: www.behaviordesign.com
play: www.subtraction.com

At 04:58 -0800 16/12/2004, Roy Morita wrote in Re: ClearType digression:
> > And amaze your Windows XP friends with LCD displays by enabling
>ClearType on their computers.
>
>Holy #$%^!! I just tried it on my Pee Cee LCD monitor at work. The
>letters were so blurry I could barely read them.

At 06:53 -0800 16/12/2004, Paul Atroshenko wrote:
>I tried turning on the Clear Type function on my PC (I have an LCD screen)
>and the letters became quite fuzzy! Back to Standard for me... LOL!

Curious. I tried it on Virtual PC 6 on my PowerBook an it's
transformed the 6 to 8 hours per week I have to use Windows. It's
much more tolerable already. I hadn't realised just how ugly type on
Windows is until ClearType made it more beautiful.

Cheers,

Miraz

--
Web-Designer Writer Trainer Learner
Blog: http://mactips.info

> > And amaze your Windows XP friends with LCD displays by enabling ClearType on > their computers.
>
>Holy #$%^!! I just tried it on my Pee Cee LCD monitor at work. The letters were so blurry I could barely read them.

Perhaps you have one of the rare displays on which the color elements are ordered other than RGB. The ClearType Tuner <http://www.Microsoft.com/typography/> lets you change this assumption.

There is also a surprisingly subjective aspect to this. ClearType Tuner lets you choose from six subvariants for XP. I thought this was to compensate for differing response curves of various monitors, but my wife and I choose different settings on the same laptop, and I choose differently depending on whether I am wearing my regular glasses or reading glasses.

In its Appearance preference pane, Apple offers one choice of non-ClearType smoothing (for CRT's), and three variants of ClearType smoothing (for LCD's). This dialog is badly worded because it is not obvious to anyone without a magnifying glass, time to experiment, and knowledge of digital typography, that the "Light" and "Strong" smoothing choices are ClearType variants for LCD monitors, in addition to the Medium ClearType variant indicated as "best for Flat Panel".

> I tried turning on the Clear Type function on my PC (I have an LCD screen)
> and the letters became quite fuzzy! Back to Standard for me... LOL!

For me, wearing reading glasses goes a long way to fixing the fuzziness problem, on Mac or PC. (They also make my 12" iBook screen appear bigger. Yay reading glasses!)

Of course, it is a matter of taste whether one prefers font smoothing of any kind to bitmapped fonts. I guess this thread has shown why ClearType isn't turned on by default!

I think it's a pity that neither Apple nor Microsoft offers an option of applying the "subpixel addressing" concept of ClearType to improve "bitmap" fonts (by which I here mean "black and white" fonts without partially illuminated pixels of any kind), which are still preferred by a lot of people. I.e., in regular bitmapped fonts the RGB elements are always full-on or full-off, in groups of 3; always ordered RGB, making the "stair stepping" obvious, but preserving crispness.

On an LCD, they could preserve this crispness, but reduce horizontal stair stepping 3-fold, by shifting 1-pixel lines (for example) one-third of a pixel to the left or right when needed, by turning off appropriate R G or B subpixel elements.

This is the essence of what ClearType does now, but then they alienate some people by partially illuminating some adjacent subpixels in the name of smoothing. E.g. Apple renders a one pixel wide line that falls between 2 pixels as rg__gb (where lower case letters indicate partially illuminated subpixels, capitals indicate full illumination, and underbar indicates no illumination). Fans of crisp fonts would no doubt prefer R___GB or RG___B to this (shifting the line to the left or right by 1/6 of a pixel), but Apple (and Microsoft) force them to go without ClearType entirely, and get ___RGB or RGB___ , pushing the line left or right by fully 1/2 a pixel, tripling the stair stepping beyond what it needs to be.

But I digress... ;-) --Christopher

--On Thursday, December 16, 2004 6:53:59 AM CST -0800 Paul Atroshenko
<patroshhotmail.com> wrote:

> I tried turning on the Clear Type function on my PC (I have an LCD
> screen)
> and the letters became quite fuzzy! Back to Standard for me... LOL!
>
> Paul

This is actually becoming a fairly huge issue at the company I work for.
We rolled out some new standard fonts and have been getting complaints that
they look fuzzy. Our solution is to tell users how to change their font
smoothing and have them pick the one that looks best.

I've had LCD users tell me None is best, and CRT users tell me Clear Type
is best (despite Clear Type being "optimized" for LCD monitors.) Haven't
had anyone say they like Standard best yet. There doesn't seem to be a
clear consensus that one method is preferable to another, even within
monitor types/sizes (our standard is 17" LCD, 19" LCD or 19" CRT depending
on how much the office wants to spend.)

Kevin

Just to clarify, we're talking about anti-aliasing of fonts.
Microsoft productizes it under the name "ClearType", but that name is
not a generic for the function.

John Gruber has an excellent dissection of anti-aliasing, and the
methods used in Panther vs. Jaguar.
        http://daringfireball.net/2003/11/panther_text_rendering

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

At 06:02 PM 12/17/2004 -0800, Andrew Laurence wrote:
>Just to clarify, we're talking about anti-aliasing of fonts. Microsoft
>productizes it under the name "ClearType", but that name is not a generic
>for the function.

ClearType appears to be a specific kind of anti-aliasing, not just
anti-aliasing in general that's been around for quite a while.

I tried turning it off on my PC laptop -- it was pre-installed on and I
didn't know about it until this thread came up. The immediate change was
clearly for the worse. In particular, Verdana looked thin and jagged. But
what was also clear is that I would choose different fonts, sizes, and
styles if I turned ClearType off. So it doesn't surprise me that people who
have been running for months or years without ClearType -- and thus have
adjusted their systems for best viewing without ClearType -- would dislike
the effect of turning it on, or find that they would need to manipulate
many other settings to make good use of it. It doesn't stand as an isolated
setting.

I also found that after turning it off and on a couple of times, the LCD
Screen Striping setting had inexplicably changed from RGB to BGR. I really
don't think I did that. And there's no question that the wrong striping
setting will make type look *much* fuzzier. In Khoi Vinh's posted sample,
the XP-ClearType example is distinctly clearer on my monitor in the normal
size type; the only explanation I can devise is that the XP example was
captured with the wrong striping setting.

Of course, it may well be that some people's eyes are more sensitive to the
colored edges that result from ClearType. But check that striping setting
carefully.

And yes, computer glasses (they were piano glasses when I was growing up)
make a difference for anyone over 40, and especially for anyone over 50.
Generally the correction relative to distant objects will be about +1.25
diopters, which is about half what it is for true reading glasses. But a
monitor is viewed close enough that this needs to be tuned for each
person's preferred viewing distance. A few inches matters a lot once you
get into your 50s. During the interregnum, you can get away with glasses
set for the maximum distance at which you view, or use computer glasses
also for reading. At 55, I can't change my viewing distance more than about
6" without either changing glasses or accepting some blurring. When I have
to look at something on screen really close, I go to true reading glasses,
or the small reading area I have at the bottom of my computer glasses.

Edward Reid

On 12/21/04 5:03 AM, "Edward Reid" <edwardpaleo.org> wrote:

> And yes, computer glasses (they were piano glasses when I was growing up)
> make a difference for anyone over 40, and especially for anyone over 50.
> Generally the correction relative to distant objects will be about +1.25
> diopters, which is about half what it is for true reading glasses.

I wonder if there's some sort of correlation between appreciation of
ClearType (which I think is fantastic) versus age. I suppose an age poll
would be inappropriate.

On 12/23/2004 8:58, "Dennis T Cheung" <dtcpobox.com> wrote:

> On 12/21/04 5:03 AM, "Edward Reid" <edwardpaleo.org> wrote:
>
>> And yes, computer glasses (they were piano glasses when I was growing up)
>> make a difference for anyone over 40, and especially for anyone over 50.
>> Generally the correction relative to distant objects will be about +1.25
>> diopters, which is about half what it is for true reading glasses.
>
> I wonder if there's some sort of correlation between appreciation of
> ClearType (which I think is fantastic) versus age. I suppose an age poll
> would be inappropriate.
>
>
Well, I can see a difference (I finally got around to trying ClearType on my
1999 IBM laptop). I'm not sure which I prefer. I've left it on ClearType
for the moment.

  --John (Age: geezer--65, Computer glasses: yes)

Just to add to the ClearType vs Apple discussion, Adobe Reader has a
feature called CoolType that is optional, and recommended for laptops
and LCD screens. I believe this can be activated on both Macs and
Windows.

Looking at the newly released Adobe Reader 7, there seems to be fewer
features with regards to CoolType. We used to be able to calibrate it,
but not any more.