eiffelroom - Who invented font smoothing? - Comments

Greyscale vs. subpixel addressing

nenieorg — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:02:45 -0700

The difference between the types of antialiasing (grey pixels vs. colour ones exploiting the banding of RGB on LCD screens) is explained here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

I'm no big fan of subpixel rendering, I sort of see some colour leakage on medium-resolution LCDs, but greyscaling I find quite nice. Of course in all case the apps and the OS should respect the user setting!

Font Smoothing

mrbobmac — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:56:10 -0700

I just read your entry, and I could not agree MORE! I hate font-smoothing. I guess my question about font-smoothing is this: Why take nice, crisp, clear Excel text, and make it blurry?

I work with Excel all day. Font smoothing wears out my eyes.

What is particularly frustrating for me is that I just got a new hard drive yesterday, and the guys upstairs loaded XP and Office 2007 for me. Now Excel doesn't have clear text anymore. I guess I fixed this myself when I got my last hard drive, but I have no idea what I did. I tried all of the standard "turn off font smoothing" steps to no avail. Maybe a reboot will do it...

But bottom line isn't why I cannot get Excel to do it today. It's why in the world this is so cotton-pickin' difficult.

The various style have an

manus_eiffel — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:51:00 -0700

The various styles have an impact on how blurry it is but it still remains blurry to my eyes. This is similar to the effect setting that you can find on XP when for `Standard' vs `ClearType'.

With respect to Vision2, we simply follow the OS decision so the user gets what he wants.

Mac font smoothing style

peter_gummer — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:02:46 -0700

I used to have mild myopia, until I had laser surgery on my eyes five years ago. I don't think I had encountered font smoothing prior to then, but I do like the smoothing now: I don't perceive it as blurriness.

Mac OS X has a System Preferences option, under Appearances, called "Font smoothing style". Have you tried "Standard - best for CRT"? On my LCD screen, it appears to have the effect of turning font smoothing off, as far as I can tell: when I lost my myopia I also lost my ability to see fine details at close range. What I can see clearly is that there is big difference when I zoom (holding down the Control key while moving the mouse ball): "Standard - best for CRT" shows various shades of grey surrounding the text, whereas all of the other font smoothing styles show shades of blues and reds and oranges around the text. I don't know how much of this is an effect of the zooming, but the fact that there's a clear difference when zooming makes me suspect your eyes may like the "Standard - best for CRT" style.

Note that the change takes effect when you open an application.

So what happens in our Vision2 applications? Is font smoothing always switched off?

Who invented font smoothing?

manus_eiffel — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:53:25 -0700

Facts

It's unlike me to complain (or maybe it's not, up to you to decide), but in the past few years it seems that software vendors have decided what was best for me and I really do not like this, especially when it affects 100% of the time I'm in front of my computer.

It all started when Windows XP (2000/2001) and Mac OS (2001) came out with smooth fonts. At the time, only Windows got it right. That is to say, you could disable it, period! On the Mac, you could and can still only disable it for a font size smaller than a certain value but you can only set this value at most to 12pt. How useless this is, especially when the Mac default font is more like 14pt! Basically, it means you cannot turn it off.

It's no wonder why a former Mac addict (from 1985 to 1999, the year when Apple decided not to support my expensive PowerPC with Mac OS X) such as myself will not go back to using Mac OS – at least not until they get rid of font smoothing.

Then Vista came along. But, Vista is now just like Mac OS, and maybe even worse since although you have a setting to turn it off, only half of the windows of the OS follow this setting – so in effect, you can't turn it off. This is actually ugly to look at. For me, among the zillions of reasons not to upgrade to Vista, that's the number one.

Then, Office 2007 came along and did the same thing. Even if your Windows XP has the setting off, Office is a bad application and still decides to use smooth fonts. This is why I'm sticking to Office 2003 until they fix this in a future version of Office.

But why this posting now? Simply because last night, Apple, like they do every two weeks, reminded me to update QuickTime on my laptop, but this time around, it also proposed "Safari" for Windows. I was curious and decided to install it. I was actually very excited to try it since IE and Firefox like to use a lot of memory and wanted to see how it would compare on that front. But my excitement was quickly turned down when font smoothing was enabled and like Mac OS the setting to disable it was pretty useless. For me this is a "Bye Bye" to Safari. It is sad, because the other Apple Softwares I've tried on Windows do not suffer from this problem.

Are you like me? Anyone want to join me on a crusade against font smoothing?

Why I don't like smooth fonts?

Maybe it is hard to understand for those who do not wear corrective lenses. But if you are like me with a moderate myopia, you know that without glasses everything you see is blurry. So when you wear glasses and something is blurry, you always wonder whether or not it is you who needs new glasses or if there really is something wrong.

When LCDs came along, there was no way for me to go back to CRT because I could finally get very sharp edges, no more blurry pixels. You now understand why when font smoothing was introduced, I could not stand it.

Conclusion

So basically, I'm not saying font smoothing should not exist, but that it is up to the user to decide what he prefers, not the OS nor the application.

Preemptive comment

Q: Why don't I use Unix instead?

A: If nothing changes in the next few months, when it will be time to update my laptop which is becoming quite old, I might just do that.

PS

This is why in EiffelStudio this will never happen without the user's consent. Also, the blurriness of CRTs was what made EiffelStudio work great when using big fonts on Windows since I had to use them to reduce blurriness on my 1600x1200 CRT monitor. I still hope it is the case, but I haven't verified that since I've upgraded to a LCD monitor which does not need big fonts.

Update 30/23/2008: It turns out that the Mac limit of 12 is just a UI constraint and that you can change the limit to whichever value you feel like it, unfortunately like on Vista, most of the UI elements don't follow the settings including menus, lists, ....

Update 09/04/2008: I put together a web page on how to disable font smoothing on various OSes at http://dev.eiffel.com.