eiffelroom - smooth - 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?