Re: Fonts and font rendering

eph writes:

> Recently, I've been trying to get my (Windows) work laptop to render fonts better. Right now it renders them somewhere between blurry and hazy. I found some CSS for an extension in my browser that supposedly replicates Mac OS font rendering. I'm not sure how accurate it actually is, but it does look better.

eph: Fonts and font rendering.

There are basically two options for fixing font rendering on Windows, which is simply terrible. Really. ClearType produces absolutely intolerable color fringeing for me on any thin fonts. I use Windows all day at work, and I have never really been able to get it to look as good as my Linux desktop, but it's a lot better now than it was.

The more drastic option is MacType. What MacType does is actually replace the font-rendering subsystem with FreeType, which has a wide range of tuneables that give you good control over how fonts are rendered. The appearance of the results is great: just as good as on my Linux desktop. It has two downsides. One is its complexity, which I could live with. The other, though, is that it caused my most-used apps to have terrible performance. I couldn't live with that, and uninstalled it.

MacType (WWW)

The next thing I tried, and which I'm currently using, is BetterClearTypeTuner. It does what it says on the box, and lets you adjust ClearType's tuneable settings directly rather than having to go through the five pages of the standard ClearType tuner and have to guess at what you're picking each time.

These days, that's effectively one tuneable, contrast, because Microsoft has disabled the functionality of three of the ClearType registry settings, and two of them have objectively correct settings for your setup. You can choose whether to use grayscale smoothing, or what layout of pixels your monitor has for subpixel smoothing. But because ClearType is so heavily optimized for subpixel smoothing, grayscale is out... except maybe for HDPI screens; I wouldn't know. So leave those alone, and turn the 'contrast' setting way down; the default is something like 1800 or 2000; you'll want to drop it down to 1200 or so to get rid of color-fringeing. Nothing to do about the other problems with Windows font rendering, but it solves the worst problem for me.

Better ClearType Tuner (WWW)